Category: 2020 Lexicon Big Year

May 22: Not easy to pronounce, Steven Poole’s rare word for today, but I love it: deipnosophist. According to him, it’s a very ancient Greek word that still finds a place in dictionaries, and it means “someone learned in the mysteries of the kitchen.” But it’s more than that. If you’re a deipnosophist, you’re a whiz-bang chef but also a “philosopher-eater,” someone who shines intellectually over a dinner party table. Dinner parties quickly bore me and I can cook but barely, but hey, I can dream of one day morphing into a deipnosophist.

What word has struck me over the last week or so? It’s distancing, that is, the verb distance and its associated noun. Until recently, we would “travel a long distance” but the verb, as in “I distance myself from him,” was rarely used. Now “social distancing” and “social distance” are lockdown commonplaces.

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.

May 14: Poole surfs back to the 1600s and 1700s for a logodaedalus, someone who is “a cunning wordsmith.” Oh, here in Australia, that’s a term we’d assign to the crossword maestro David Astle. I love logodaedalus but I’ll surely never use the word.

I read in an Australian Financial Review article by Christopher Joye about his “clients that are prepared to bet against hysteria and exploit the ineluctable regression to the mean in financial spreads.” Ineluctable? I’d heard the word but what exactly does it mean? Well, it seems the dictionary definition is “unable to be resisted or avoided; inescapable.” Is ineluctable better than “inescapable”? I think that when it is employed (and it shouldn’t be used every day), yes, ineluctable is a brilliant choice.

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.

May 6: this is a old lost word that Steven Poole considers we should resurrect after the terrible, farcical Global Financial Crisis. Instead of loading this industry with respect and deploying the term “financial trader,” Poole believes we should reach back to the term “stockjobber,” which has the meaning, Poole explains, given by Dr Johnson: “A low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares in the funds.” I know plenty of financial traders. A few of them I’d be happy to describe as stockjobbers.

I came across “petrichor” in a crossword. Petrichor means “a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.” What a wonderful, subtle word. And how intriguing does petrichor sound when rolled around your mouth?

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.

Apr 30: Steven Poole doesn’t dive back hundreds of years to come up with “edgelord,” a word apparently in popular use only since 2015. I’ve never come across it, but it means a person who “posts on internet forums and social media with the express intent of being as ‘edgy’ as possible, expressing the most nihilistic or outrageous opinions he can think of.” Me, I can only dream of growing up to become an edgelord.

In Rebecca Giggs’ wonderful “Fathoms,” I came across: “It took thirty-six hours to butcher a whale — a mephitic, spattering task.” Mephitic? I guessed a meaning of devilish, but the dictionary is more matter of fact: “foul-smelling, noxious (especially of a gas or vapour).” What a delicious word!

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.

Apr 24: I don’t know many people these days who have read Kurt Vonnegut. Cat’s Cradle was one of his weirdest and in it he invented the word foma. Steven Poole describes foma as a “very useful term” meaning “harmless untruths,” the falsehoods we need in order “to be cheerful.” Oh, I’m aware that so many of my foundational notions are foma!

My word? One that I love but rarely see, the adjective rapacious, meaning “aggressively greedy or grasping.” For decades, I couldn’t believe anyone would work for a tobacco company. Now I feel the same about coal companies. Their rapaciousness bewilders me.

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.

Apr 15: Steven Poole’s word is illaqueate, meaning “ensnared, entangled, or entrapped,” all with embossed with the sensation of being in a maze. “In our time, perhaps,” writes Poole, “fake news and conspiracy theories do not merely hoodwink their consumers, but illaqueate them.”

I can’t believe I’ve never come across tsundoku, apparently a Japanese word adopted by us, to denote piling up books for later, even if (and probably this is the point of it) one will never read them.

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.

Apr 8: Steven Poole’s word is ikigai, which has, according to him, “become a lifestyle trend in anglophone countries,” though I’d never heard of it. Poole describes its meaning as a meld of raison d’être or vocation/calling, some kind of fundamental sense of meaningfulness. Yet he says “it can also describe small daily pleasures such as drinking coffee in the sun.” All of which baffles. Poole compares it briefly to that Danish puzzlement, hygge. I roll both of them around my tongue: hygge … ikigai.

My personally gleaned word for April 8 is sympatric. Never heard of it? I don’t blame you, it’s an academic word from biology denoting two species that coexist, without interbreeding, even though they’re very similar. What seems to happen is that the two species fit into the environment at different levels or in different places or with different foods, etc. Why am I so attracted to this? Because it keeps popping up in my research on Cranes and there are plenty of cases where two different species of Cranes are sympatric. And don’t you think sympatric sounds sweet?

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.

Mar 18: Steven Poole tells me a punctilio is a “tiny detail … a nice point of exactness.” Right now, under Covid-19 lockdown, many behaviours amount to punctilios: avoiding touching banisters, preserving four square meters, paying by card rather than case, etc. Of course the biggest lockdown requirement – isolate yourself, buster – is the exact opposite of a punctilio. My word on that day? I liked the sound of friable, although its definition – easily crumbled – doesn’t seem to match that sound.

Mar 28: Poole has a word to describe my mood yesterday morning. “To be mumpish is to be sullen and sulky.” Man, was I mumpish! And I guess I exhibited my word of the day: I acerbated, that is, I vexed and annoyed. Today was much better, thank you.

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.

You’d think it easy to spend five minutes a day reading a quick definition of a nifty, no-longer-used word, but I’m struggling, both to find the time and to muster the motivation. I’m mostly sticking with the discipline. Some days I find myself catching up on three or four days in arrears. All well and good.

Mar 11: to ostentate is to show off. This is one of Poole’s most “straight” words, for we’re all familiar with ostentation. The word I like today is enucleate, which has any number of technical meanings revolving around removing the nucleus from an object, including surgically excising an eyeball, but which I saw in the context of a bird snipping out boles of wood from a tree.

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.

Feb 22: A quidnunc is “an inveterate gossip, or an annoyingly pestering and inquisitive person.” They’re hell on earth for introverts like me. Feb 26: Steven Poole tells me of a word from the early 1700s which means “to trick or cheat,” namely to fugle, which just about sums up the temper of our present times. I’d like to use these two words sometime soon, discovered by me from the jumble of everyday swirling words: earbirding and refulgent. I do earbirding, that is, I identify birds solely from their calls, though I didn’t know I do that until just recently. And “refulgent green eyes” shine radiantly.

Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.