This week fanfiction has yielded several words, two new, one old, and all very precise. A lot of nonsense gets thrown around about fanfiction and the writers thereof being cheesy and inept and just playing at writing, when if they were really serious they’d all be writing the Great American Novel (or what have you) already. I won’t even dignify the final part of that, but I find that fanfic writers are some of the most serious users of words you’ll ever meet. They constantly seek to refine what they say and how they say it make it better, more descriptive, and more precise, while avoiding all the pitfalls that come with moving something away from its genesis. So when I get to read great stories and learn new words at the same time, it is, as the kids say, made of win.

Osculation: the act of kissing

Found this brand new this week! I was reading a drabble—a story exactly 100 words long—about Wash and Zoe, written by a good friend. I had to look it up because at first I read “oscillation” and that didn’t make any sense at all. Contextually, folk were kissing. Just get a load of this:

“Slowly.” He kissed her mouth tasting her swollen lips, savoring the sweetness of her anxious tongue. Fingertips light on skin that covered her…everything. Her own hands shook with anticipation as he broke the osculation.

And osculation is indeed, all about smooches. After I stopped daydreaming long enough to look it up, I found that its verb form, osculate, is a mathematical term for the contact of two curves. I was giddy. Not only did it press my Wash/Zoe button, but also my math button, which is very close by, because my fanon concept of Wash is very mathematical and scientific under all his goofiness and aloha shirts and toy dinos. It’s not a word that could be used everywhere and there are plenty of other synonyms for kiss, but the precision of the word, especially because there are only 99 others to tell the whole story, is amazing.

Lavaliere: a pendant or chain worn around the neck

I knew this word, not in the least sense from having a sister who is Phi Mu and I remember the lavaliere thing being a big deal for her. But this word has come up several times in some Hermione-centric Harry Potter fic lately and I was curious about how it was different than a pendant, or a locket, or any of the other things women routinely drape around their necks. It seems that most necklace jewelry is based on the pendant idea, and that word comes from the Latin (undifferentiated in the Vulgate, too, which is interesting) pendere, meaning “to hang.” Same root as words like pendulum. But the lavaliere goes further and says that it must have a stone, usually a jewel. The word is a contraction of a name, The Duchesse de la Valliere, one of the mistresses of Louis XIV, who popularized it. In this way, it can be a very precise word choice, especially in terms of fic—a necklace with royal connotation, holding a stone which in turn, is imbued with magical power. With a single word, the reader understands much, much more about that particular piece of jewelry and what it might possibly mean in terms of plot, than if the author were to say just “necklace” or even “pendant.”

Mendacity: habitual dishonesty or a tendency to lie

It’s no secret that I read Hermione-oriented stories because they represent the greatest portion of Snape-fic wherein he’s heterosexually paired.¹ I recently gave up on a lengthy story because it was overly descriptive: nine pages in the middle of something that was already 50,000 or so words long about how Snape was really good at potions and Hermione liked to read. But right before the fit of Oh You Have Got to Be Kidding Me, I noticed the author described Snape’s mendacity. I knew contextually that it meant something bad, but I was sure if it was bad-greedy or bad-liar or bad-temperamental. So I looked it up and again, another extremely precise word. To be mendacious is not just to be a liar, but to be constantly lying to the point that it’s a mark of character. And it has a great root word, the Latin mendax, meaning “false.”

Read some fanfic this week. I promise you’ll learn something new.

¹ If you know of some really good, long, plotty, possibly erotic Snape/Tonks or Snape/Sprout, I beg you, point me.

Dixiephobia: an intense disdain for the South and southerners.

I encountered dixiephobia this week and am very glad of it. I’ve been trying for a long time to think of a word for a mindset that says all people in the South are toothless, shoeless, ignorant racists. I read it in an article by Deroy Murdock discussing the vitriol aimed at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research after they published statistics about Al Gore’s energy usage at his Nashville home. Murdock quotes a number of emails the TCPR received, all of which show, at best, an egregiously limited understand of people and life in the south. To wit:

“Why don’t you all go back to shooting one another across the hollows instead of trying to make people think anyone in Tennessee has an ounce of intelligence?” Roger Miller insisted. “Or better yet, get your snaggle tooth grins capped and learn to read and write…Someone who’s traveled the world here, and never ever wants to even fly across your state again.”

Nice. What do you think? I think dixiephobia is a misnomer the same way homophobia is a misnomer. There’s no fear there, unless it’s some vestigial fear of possibly turning southern (“Hi Mom? Dad? I’ve decided to let you know… I’m… Well, the thing is, and I think I’ve known this since I was a little kid… I’m a southerner.”), which makes about as much sense as fear of catching The Gay. You could spend too much time in the South and wind up… I don’t know—saying please, and thank you, and yes sir, yes ma’am, and slowing the hell down for a minute, and developing a taste for sweet tea. As fates go, that? Rules. Miller needs a nice long community ed course in “tolerance.”

In fact, that in and of itself is a great example of doublespeak. The movement to attach “-phobia” to words to mean “hatred of” disservices both genuine phobias (as agora-, hydro-, etc.) and those people whose irrational prejudices need to be legitimately corrected. As long as you name the uneducated, baseless loathing of an individual or group with the same terminology as you do an uncontrollable, chemical-based fear, it will be difficult to root out and destroy the irrationality behind the loathing. That is: too much feeling, not enough thinking. Would Miller or any person like him (and there are hundreds, based on the sample emails), understand if someone sat him down and said, “You, sir, are hateful.”? He thinks he’s justified in his hatred, as he perceives southerners to be less intelligent than he, and therefore, less than fully human. Sound familiar?

Y’all take a stand against dixiephobia today, okay?

That’s it for new and interesting words this week. Marciepooh wanted something derived from Magyar. I looked and I’m still looking, but there don’t seem to be very many. There are a few borrowed words (Goulash, anyone?), but those are also few and far between. The search continues.