batrachomyomachian

wordjournal:

adjective • petty (of a quarrel)

From Ancient Greek βάτραχος (batrakos, “frog”) + μῦς (moos, “mouse”) + μάχη (makei, “battle”), from the comedy Batrachomyomachia.

onomatomania

wordjournal:

noun • /ˌän-ə-ˌmat-ə-ˈmā-nē-ə/ • 1) frustration at being unable to think of an appropriate word. 2) an obsession with or extreme love of a particular word.

ORIGIN: Greek ὂνομα, name + μανία, madness

I finally have a diagnosis.

It was full of bars and bookstores, burritos and Chinese food,” he says. “I said, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’

”

— August Kleinzahler, poet, blooms in S.F. (via kettering)

pilcrow

wordjournal:

noun • “¶”, the paragraph symbol

The leading proposed history of “¶” is that the symbol evolved from “C”, for capitulum (Latin: “chapter”). (Wikipedia illustrates the evolution.)

It’s hard for me not to reblog everything wordjournal posts. But I really do love words like this that are specific not only in meaning but also in who uses them. A lot of particular language nowadays (yes, I did just say “nowadays”; don’t get me started on kids these days and their dirty, communist, hippie blue jeans) is in the tech realm, understandably, or otherwise in the corporate realm. In both cases I tend to dislike the vocabulary. The former is way too happy to use acronyms (an API that supports RSS, JSON, and AJAX, with a free SDK including IDE; note that I am totally fine with recursive acronyms like YAML, which stands for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”) and the latter often takes great words and makes them suck (I want to keep synergy, dammit! And interface, as a noun of course). There are some gems in tech. Wiki, for example, for its etymology, and blogosphere (also, the French use “internaute”, as in astronaut, cosmonaut, aeronaut (!), internaut…awesome!).

But in general I really love words used in involved old crafts and industries. Printing and editing have a bunch of great ones (e.g., kern - also! check out the other (first, actually) definition of kern!). Also, anything having to do with ships, flags/heraldry (great adjectives like “fracted” (don’t confuse with “fructed”)), and farming and animal husbandry (forelock!).

In theses case, of course, awesomeness is usually highly correlated with likelihood of DFW using the word.

paracme

wordjournal:

noun • /par-ak′mē/ • the point at which one’s prime is past

I love this not just because the word means what it does (or the fact that such a word even exists) but also because the definition itself is poetry.

estivate

wordjournal:

verb • /ˈɛs.tə.vejt/ • 1) to spend the summer, as at a special place. 2) to pass the summer in a dormant or torpid state.

Estivation, also known as “summer sleep”, is basically the summer counterpart of hibernation.

Interesting to compare this word to “summer” used as a verb (as in, “As a child, our family summered on the Vineyard”).

an adjective for every season

wordjournal:

In light of the previous post, here are some seasonal adjectives:

vernal • of or relating to spring; young, fresh or new, as in the spring.

estival • of or relating to summer; summery.

autumnal • of or relating to fall; past maturity or middle life.

estivoautumnal • relating to or occurring in the summer and fall.

brumal, hiemal, hibernal • of or relating to winter; wintry.

I like these specific words, like crepusculur I’ve talked about before. Also, collective nouns (yes, that’s James Lipton of Inside the Actor’s Studio. One of many reasons I like DFW: he often uses specific words where other writers would use a phrase. I heard on the radio a story about Hmong people living in the US, and they mentioned a word (which I unfortunately forget) which they translated as something like “brief respite from worrying about the wellbeing of a family member”. It’s totally possible it was a compound word or phrase, but how cool is it (would it be) to have one word that means all that?