Word of the Day!

an unkindness, a travesty

 

have this

Lilt, Tilt

 

and Wilt!

But yeah, how about derelict and scramble

 

I really like scamper. It makes me think of toddlers or small animals running, it’s just a really cute word!

 

scrofula perhaps?

 

Ooh, that’s really fun-sounding/looking!! What does it mean? :0

 

it’s a kind of neck swelling-y disease! more common in the past than it is now, and used to be known as ‘the king’s evil’ in Britain because the touch of the king was said to cure it (and people did travel to court to have their necks touched by the king, though after a while one of the kings got sick of this and stopped it). if you look it up all the information is very gross, fair warning. very tasty scoff-like word though!

 

That is SUPER fascinating, thank you for explaining! :D

 

perfunctory!
succinct!

 

Wonderful is...well, a wonderful word! :D

 

Smorgasbord!!

 

I present, for thine edification, the word:

thine as the a/an distinguisher for thy

edification

word

distinguisher

fictioniferocity

 

i just went on a small journey.

i ran across the spanish word "fastidiar." i assumed it probably was a cognate with "fastidious," but i didn't know how that would work as a verb. so i looked it up and discovered it translates to "to annoy/bother." that's interesting! i thought. that's not at all what "fastidious" means in english! i wonder what the etymology is?

so i looked it up on etymonline.com. fastidious came into English more or less during the renaissance, which also marks the beginning of early modern English (ie, why Shakespeare is easier for modern readers to parse than Chaucer.) at the time it meant "prideful," which is also different from its modern English usage but in a different way! it comes from Latin, fastidiosus, meaning... "disdainful, squeamish, exacting." which is pretty much the modern meaning! how interesting, that when it was borrowed initially the meaning had evolved into something different, but has since evolved back to the original sense!

but on etymonline one of the related words was fash-- a word in Scots, which also came into the use during the renaissance, part of the same trend of borrowing from European languages that happened with "fastidious." it comes from Old French fascher (modern French fâcher), which also evolved from the Latin fastidiosus. and in both French and Scots the word means... "to annoy/bother"!

so at some point, back before French and Spanish split out of Vulgar Latin, the VL version of fastidiosus must have become a verb meaning "annoy/bother." the everyday spoken VL kept on evolving in different areas, eventually turning into Spanish and French, where the French form lost a bunch of letters (as French words often do) and got picked up by Scots. meanwhile in the formal written form of Latin, the word evolved in a different direction, to a different meaning. which was eventually borrowed into English, and then later evolved back to the original meaning.

HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS IS SO COOL YOU GUYS.

word(s) of the day: fastidious, fastidiar, fâcher, fash

 

Cacophony just seems like the perfect word for what it means somehow!

 

for the record I am aware of exactly zero uses of the word "fictioniferocity" other than in this post. I have, however, used fictioniferous to refer to works that constitute fiction to varying degrees. regarding censorship, the level of fictioniferocity of a work can determine whether it is preserved or destroyed.

however, different censorship regimes have different motivations and thus different target sets. fictioniferocity is a polarizer that can go either way: it depends on whether the regime is trying to eliminate hard evidence (which leads to destroying low-fictioniferocity works), nuanced debate (which leads to destroying high-fictioniferocity works), or every vestige of a concept (both).

it's my belief that the lowest-fictioniferocity works, built as they are on relentlessly accountable sourcing, are most vulnerable to censorship; high-fictioniferocity works make themselves more difficult to censor because any copy (however non-authoritatively it's presented) can express most or all of the author's intent. the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say.

(sorry if this wasn't an appropriate thread to put this in but I figured if I was going to present y'all with a neologism as the word of a day, I should at least give a little explanation of what it's good for besides linguistic flexing.)

 

Incessant!

 

Abhor

 

Oh, oh! Another good one, Treacherous! I love how it sounds