Hey guys, sitting in my British literature class today I had the idea to create a SnarkPit vocabulary thread. Ideally, this will be a place to post new words you've discovered. The goal isn't to assemble a compendium of useless and archaic words, but rather to, over time, shape a nice collection of useful words to expand your vocabulary. I know dictionary.com and other sites offer worthy word-of-the-day type email services, but I wanted to do this anyway.

I'll start off with some words I had to look up while reading through Elizabeth Bowen's "The Heat of the Day"

1. Crepitate
"The season was late for an outdoor concert; already leaves were drifting on to the grass stage--here and there one turned over, crepitating as though in the act of dying, and during the music some more fell."

2. Lassitude
"Such elderly people as had not been driven home by the disappearance of the sun from the last chair fearlessly exposed their years to the dusk, in a lassitude they could have shown at no other time."

3. Pertinacity
"His and her eyes met with what was already familiarity; her pertinacity and his rudeness having created a sort of bond between them and brought them to the point of a small scene."

4. Discountenance
"It could not be enough to say she was discountenanced; her eyes dropped, looking their last at those stained two of his fingers, holding the cigarette."

5. Piety
"To this spot, to which Tom had been much attached, a sort of piety made her bring any other man; she had thus the sense of living their Sundays for him."

6. Punctiliouis
"However, either the punctiliousness of a stranger or the superstition that rules any movement to do with love made the thinker wait where he was for the coming interval."

7. Apocryphal
"The autumn of 1940 was to appear, by two autumns later, apocryphal, more far away than peace."

8. Abeyance
"The frame with the regimental crest held a picture of what was at the best abeyance--at the worst, there came out of it a warning to the bottom of her heart, that no return can ever make restitution for the going away."

Oftentimes I'll have a sense of a word but will look up the exact definition for accuracy's sake. Piety for example. Anyway, use this as a springboard to document the course of your own voyage into verbosity.

:razz:

Edited to make this all less anal.

Pusilanimous - Cowardly or Timid.

Best friekin word ever.

Man, few things on the internet are more satisfying than writing a scathing reply to some smacktard and using words that you KNOW he has to look up. It just adds to the superiority of your argument.

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I tried sniffing coke, but the ice cubes kept getting stuck in my nose.
http://www.dimebowl.com

Yeah, that's pretty cool. I just looked it up and it's got 2 L's.

Pusillanimous is where the term "you're a pussy" comes from.

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I tried sniffing coke, but the ice cubes kept getting stuck in my nose.
http://www.dimebowl.com

Nickelplate said:
Man, few things on the internet are more satisfying than writing a scathing reply to some smacktard and using words that you KNOW he has to look up. It just adds to the superiority of your argument.

I am reminded of this:

Calvin said:
I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

Also:

Nickelplate said:
Pusillanimous is where the term "you're a pussy" comes from.

I don't think anyone ever asked "Can I put it in your pusillanimous?"

Pusillanimous is where the term "you're a pussy" comes from.

"You're a pussy" comes from the European and American slang for female
genatalia - "she had a f**king massive pussy" or "i licked your mums
pussy".

... okay... this thread has certainly nosedived quickly... :smile:

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-- midkay

:smile: I'm only stating the truth, honest!

As it happens, the reasoning probably comes from cats - catfood -
smells like fish (an unwashed vagina) - popularised in Hollywood. There
we have it, pussy.

Gwil said:
she had a f**king massive pussy

It's quoted, and therefore will go down in history.

Yellow journalism! :razz:

Yeah, that's pretty cool. I just looked it up and it's got 2 L's.

Yeah, I debated for like 5 minutes 'cause I couldn't remember.

I guess I could have looked it up...

10. flibbertigibbet

11. compunction

12. equanimity

13. assiduously

Our capacity for description rests on the comparison of new ideas to common, simple details of our physical world. We describe the Hippy generation as an offshoot of the Beat generation, comparing a complex osmosis of ideas to the growth of a branch off the trunk of a tree. We speak of surges of feeling, comparing our emotions to the movement of liquid.

The English-speaking world has become alien to this concept because of our inheritance of a mass of useless vocabulary that, being from older languages, we do not directly relate to such basic details of life and the world.

Vocabulary is useful to learn for reading, but in writing, one should strive to use accessible language.

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[Im_invisible] "I would suck a man off, but only for sustenance."

At the same time there are certain instances where there's a perfect word that would fit your needs... and then you draw a blank. You feel it lurking there in your passive vocabulary, but despite the best of your mental wrangling you can't pry it loose from its hidden recess and instead it burns on the tip of your tongue, on the tip of your mind, and this feeling alone throws me into serious bouts of frustration.

I work to expand my vocabulary not just for reading, but to limit and reduce these stricken moments of silence. It's like my mind is being drawn tight like a bow, and instead of loosing the arrow past my lips, the strings snaps. Bummer.

I dunno 'dog', I think that 'shizzle' still 'flows' and 'rolls' like it always has...when you strip away the imposition of higher education. Slang is that pop-vocabulary which always ties the language to it's currents status, environment, influences, etc.

Unfun - A word that apparently exists. The antonym to the word "Fun".

(Haha Captain P is going to kill me for this :wink: )

ubiquitous

16. Besotted

I came across these two today in lecture, and while I knew the meanings I thought I'd share them since they're both pretty cool.

17. Phantasmagoric

18. Vicissitudes

Yes, that last one was in V for Vendetta.

19. Anathema

20. Sycophant

Love the word 'rephrobate' for some reason :smile: , can't explain what it means in english though hehe.

But it means something like 'severely inhumane' or something like that, my band is called that ^^.

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

21. Reprobate?

In the scientific and medical communities, the technical name for using one's finger to extract boogers is rhinotillexis, and doing so compulsively is termed rhinotillexomania. The act of eating the resulting harvest is called mucophagy.

thank juim, i got myself some new WoW character names now. =D

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the players tried to take the field
the marching band refused to yield

I approve this thread.

Seriously this is great stuff, keep 'em coming. :biggrin:

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''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires

Ok, for you Scythe.

Here's the m-w.com word of the day. Pretty worthless one if you ask me, but hey...

25. antipode

And now, gentlemen, for the most obscure words in the lexicon:

Opisthenar;

Sastrugi, the only English word I know of rooted in Russian;

?lan, the only word that comes to mind to feature an accented vowel;

Acedia;

Glossolalia;

and others.

Cassius, I knew a few of those words.

Another word rooted in Russian is "Robot" it comes from the word "Rabotat'" работать which means "to work"

More obscure treasures:

• Girt - It means to have a belt on.
• co?perate is also a proper spelling. One of the only words with a Diaeresis.
• Diaeresis
• lathi
• ar?te
• h?ček

I love language.

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I tried sniffing coke, but the ice cubes kept getting stuck in my nose.
http://www.dimebowl.com

Link those definitions for us lazyfolk!

31(-ish). Resource
32(maybe). Recourse

^___^

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o

Vocab from Julian Barnes' "England, England."

39. Trope
40. Egregious
41. Porphyry
42. Fairisle
43. Tussocky
44. Peroration
45. Scrimshaw
46. Junta

Enjoy.

47. Felicitous

48. Soporific

Interrobang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

I just got done reading an interesting article on American television culture after 9/11 called "Entertainment Wars" written by Lynn Spigel.

Quite a few new words:

50. Jingoism
51. Paucity
52. Reify
53. Pedagogy
54. Pabulum