TETHNEKA
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I am dead (Ancient Greek)
A wonderful man by the name of Mr Brown taught me Latin and Ancient Greek. I remember the enthusiasm with which he related the possibility of saying “I am dead” in Ancient Greek; although grammatically proper, it is utterly useless outside of the theatre. |
AND
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conj. Used to connect words, phrases, or clauses that have the same grammatical function in a construction.
And is one of my favourite everyday words. I am given to understand that sentences should never begin with and because it creates a sentence fragment. |
EVIL
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adj. Morally bad or wrong, wicked.
What was once used to express an unequivocal catholic truth is now a relative term subject to individual belief systems. John Locke believed that we should have a clear understanding of what we mean to convey by moral words prior to using them in conversation. When the American editor of Roget’s Thesaurus removed the words ‘fugue’ and ‘aria,’ lest they corrupt the American public, he ruined the book by the misapplication of evil. |
BLITHE
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adj. Joyous.
To mock death: after Noël Coward. |
ACRE
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n. The amount of land one man can work in one day.
Currently used to designate a unit of land, but originally it delineated the amount of land one man can work in a day; acre describes the evolution from what we can do to what we can have. |
FAIRLEC
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n. Fairness, beauty.
I once played a dictionary game. I don’t like games, but I love dictionaries. When my turn came I had already decided upon fairlec; unfortunately the word on which the game hinged had to be in the dictionary provided. I am still waiting for an opportunity to use fairlec. |
ASPERITY
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n. Harshness of manner; ill temper or irritability.
When applied to a person asperity combines a roughness of surface and sound. It can also be used to describe either a roughness of sound or surface. |
NO
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No No
Necessary, but inadequate: after Heidegger. |
RIBAUD
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n. Middle English. A person of low status, scoundrel, lecher.
Originally appropriated from the Old French. In English it can also be used to describe language: “The ribbald invectives which occupy the place of argument” - Edmund Burke |
TRENCHANT
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adj. Incisive or keen, as language or a person; caustic; cutting; trenchant wit.
“What is cut. What is cut by it. What is cut by it in.” – Gertrude Stein |
LAPIDARY
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adj. Marked by conciseness, precision, or refinement of expression.
Precision, which depends on two minds understanding exactly the same thing, causes the corrosion of both concision and refinement. |
DREICH
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adj. (Scots) Dreary, dull, bleak.
Dreich is usually used onomatopoeically to describe weather: a particularly insidious kind of rain common in Scotland. |
VAUNT
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v. To boast or brag; to use boastful, bragging, or vainglorious language.
“[…]Rather I prize the doubt Low kinds exist without, […] Poor vaunt of life indeed, Were man but formed to feed […] For thence, - a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - […]” – Robert Browning |
PLENARY
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adj. Complete in every respect
The scientist, James Clerk Maxwell, was sad to discover that Dr Johnson had left ‘molecule’ out of his dictionary. |
PROPINQUITY
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n. Proximity; nearness.
Can describe a proximity in space, kinship, nature, or time, but propinquity is always subject to time, whether temporal or eternal. |
PROPITIOUS
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adj. Presenting favourable circumstances; auspicious.
The perfidious desire to know. |
PERORATION
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n. The concluding part of a discourse and especially an oration.
n. A highly rhetorical speech The most perilous of all endgames. |
PULCHRITUDE
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n. Physical beauty
A dear friend once told me that his mother had assured him that he need never be afraid of a word he did not know, since most of them could be deciphered logically. Pulchritude defies a mother’s comfort. |
CONSONANT
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adj. Being in agreement or accord.
One of the ‘hard, usual words’ listed in Robert Cawdrey’s English dictionary of 1604 where he defines it as ‘agreeable, likelie.’ |
REFUTE
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v. To prove to be false or erroneous, as an opinion or charge.
Disprove, contest, rebut; counter, repudiate, negate; contradict: proof that synonyms are not synonymous. |
SUBORN
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v. To induce (a person) to commit an unlawful or evil act.
1. v. trans. To bribe, induce, or procure (a person) by underhand or unlawful means to commit a misdeed. 2.a v. spec. To bribe or unlawfully procure (a person) to make accusations or give evidence; to induce to give false testimony or to commit perjury. Also, to procure (evidence) by such unlawful means. 2.b v. To procure the performance or execution of (a thing) by bribery or other corrupt means. 3. v. To prepare provide or procure, esp. in a secret, stealthy, or underhand manner. Obs. 4. v. To furnish, equip, adorn. Obs. 5. v. To give support to, aid, assist. Obs. 6. v. To introduce or bring to one’s aid with a sinister motive. Obs. The OED. |
REPUDIATE
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v. To reject as having no authority or binding force: to repudiate a claim.
Synonyms are not synonymous. Cf. refute. |
PROFLIGATE
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adj. Utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute.
Wild (13..); desolate (c1386); unthrift (1388); riotous (c1405); resolute (1475); palliard (1484); dissolute (1513); royetous (1526); rakehell (1556); dissolutious (1560); sluttish (1575); rakehelly (1579); low (1599); lavish (1600); rakelly (c1600); profligate (1627); profligated (1652); rantipole (1660); abandoned (1692); raking (1696); rakish (1696); dissipated (1744); dissipating (1818); outward (1875). The HTOED. |
SEDULOUS
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adj. Diligent in application or attention; persevering; assiduous.
“Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called The Vanity of Morals: it was to have had a second part, The Vanity of Knowledge; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne.” – Robert Louis Stevenson |
DISAPPOINTED
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adv. Thwarted in hope, desire, or expectation.
“Our unsleepable friend” Cf. un’sleakable, adj. Obs. (c 1475)- unquenchable, un’quenchable adj. – incapable of being quenched; inextinguishable. |
CANT
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n. The peculiar language or jargon of a class
n. Singing, musical sound. “Cant and vision are to the ear and the eye, the same that tickling is to the touch.” - Jonathan Swift |
PELLUCID
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adj. Admitting the passage of light; transparent or translucent.
adj. Transparently clear in style or meaning. “Before the time of Newton, white light was supposed to be of all known things the purest.” - James Clerk Maxwell Newton separated colours using a prism, showing that white was the combination of all of the colours of the spectrum. Miss Prism: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” - Oscar Wilde |
GARGANTUAN
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adj. Huge, enormous.
“Rabelais, whose wit prodigiously was made, All men, professions, actions to invade, With so much furious vigour, as if it Had lived o'er each of them, and each had quit, Yet with such happy sleight and careless skill, As, like the serpent, doth with laughter kill, So that although his noble leaves appear Antic and Gottish, and dull souls forbear To turn them o'er, lest they should only find Nothing but savage monsters of a mind, - No shapen beauteous thoughts; yet when the wise Seriously strip him of his wild disguise, Melt down his dross, refine his massy ore, And polish that which seem'd rough-cast before, Search his deep sense, unveil his hidden mirth, And make that fiery which before seem'd earth (Conquering those things of highest consequence, What's difficult of language or of sense), He will appear some noble table writ In the old Egyptian hieroglyphic wit; Where, though you monsters and grotescoes see, You meet all mysteries of philosophy.” – Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty: translator of Rabelais, and author of the Logopandecteision. |
HIRPLE
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v. (Scots) To walk with a limp, to drag a limb, to walk lamely; to move with a gait somewhere between walking and crawling.
Pronunciation: [h – ur – p – (e) – l]: h as in hot, inhale (main stress); ur as in burn; p as in pine; e as in beaten; l as in leap, hill. |
PERTINACIOUS
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adj. Stubborn or obstinate.
In literature: saga. A story, popularly believed to be matter of fact, which has been developed by gradual accretions in the course of ages, and has been handed down by oral tradition. |
ADUMBRATE
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v. To give a sketchy outline of.
v. To overshadow; to shade, obscure. Adumbrate is derived from the Latin ‘umbra,’ meaning shadow, from which ‘umbrella’ also descends; like the umbrella, it gives shape, collects, and protects. |
IMMURE
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tr. v. To confine within or as if within walls; imprison.
A purring pen. |
PERFIDY
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n. Deceitfulness, untrustworthiness; breach of faith or of promise; betrayal of trust; treachery.
The difference between perfidy and treachery is the difference between word and deed: perfidy persuades and treachery betrays. |
SPURIOUS
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adj. Lacking authenticity or validity in essence or origin.
Hamlet: Act 1; Scene 5; Lines 166 – 167: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. |
FESCENNINE
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adj. Licentious, obscene.
adj. A song or verses of a licentious or scurrilous character. Obs. From the Latin, pertaining to Fescennia of Etruria, a town famous for its licentious and scurrilous poetry. Fescennine verse was an early type of Italian poetry from which satire is said to have developed. |
CONCATENATION
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n. Connect or link in a series or chain.
“And as for the facility of credit which is yielded to arts and opinions, it is likewise of two kinds; either when too much belief is attributed to the arts themselves, or to certain authors in any art. The sciences themselves, which have had better intelligence and confederacy with the imagination of man than with his reason, are three in number: astrology, natural magic, and alchemy; of which sciences, nevertheless, the ends or pretences are noble. For astrology pretendeth to discover that correspondence or concatenation which is between the superior globe and the inferior; natural magic pretendeth to call and reduce natural philosophy from variety of speculations to the magnitude of works; and alchemy pretendeth to make separation of all the unlike parts of bodies which in mixtures of natures are incorporate. But the derivations and prosecutions to these ends, both in the theories and in the practices, are full of error and vanity; which the great professors themselves have sought to veil over and conceal by enigmatical writings, and referring themselves to auricular traditions and such other devices, to save the credit of impostures.” – Sir Francis Bacon |
ACEDIA
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n. Spiritual torpor and apathy.
The fourth century monk, Evagrius, who listed acedia as one of his eight evil thoughts or temptations, referred to acedia as the ‘dameon qui etiam meridianus vocatur:’ the noonday demon. This list was the basis of Pope Gregory the Great’s Seven Deadly Sins. Gregory combined acedia (discouragement) with tristitia (sorrow) to form sloth, and added envy. |
GARRULOUS
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adj. Given to excessive and often trivial or rambling talk.
One of the ignominious traits of Mrs Bennet. |
MENDACIOUS
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adj. False; untrue.
First recorded usage by Richard Sheldon in his “A Survey of the Miracles of the Church of Rome, proving them to be Antichristian” of 1616. |
SYNCRETISM
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n. Reconciliation or fusing of different systems of belief especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.
“And yet it does move” - Galileo Galilei |
AGELASTIC
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Adj. and n. Not jovial, being one who does not laugh.
Sir Isaac Newton was agelastic. He is said to have laughed only once when someone asked him the value of studying Euclid. |
QUIDDATIVE
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adj. Of or relating to the ‘quiddity’ or essence of a person or thing, essential.
Hamlet: Act 2; Scene 2; Lines 303 – 318: “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth nothing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights me not; nor woman neither, […]” Cf. Spurious. |
DELETERIOUS
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adj. Having a harmful effect; injurious.
“'T is pity wine should be so deleterious, For tea and coffee leave us much more serious, Unless when qualified with thee, Cogniac! Sweet Naiad of the Phlegethontic rill! Ah! why the liver wilt thou thus attack, And make, like other nymphs, thy lovers ill? I would take refuge in weak punch, but rack (In each sense of the word), whene'er I fill My mild and midnight beakers to the brim, Wakes me next morning with its synonym.” – Lord Byron |
EXIGUOUS
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adj. Extremely scanty; meagre.
From the Latin verb exigo: I drive out; I demand, require, enforce (exact pay); I measure (against a standard), weigh; I examine, test, determine. Cf. the birth of geometry. |
APODEICTIC
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adj. Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration.
Applied by Kant to a proposition enouncing a necessary, and hence absolute, truth; the ‘Dei’ are apodeictic from the practical, moral point of view. Kant distinguished the apodeictic from the problematic and the assertoric. |
APODICTIC
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adj. Necessarily or demonstrably true. Beyond dispute.
“There are, I am aware, persons who willingly admit, that not in articles of faith alone, but in the heights of geometry, and even in the necessary first principles of natural philosophy, there exist truths of apodictic force in reason, which the mere understanding strives in vain to comprehend.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Cf. Derrida |
VULTUOUS
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adj. Of a grave and solemn countenance, or of a heavy and sad look.
I adopted ‘vultuous’ from the Oxford English Dictionaries’ ‘Save the Words’ campaign on the 9th of September 2009. |
LACUNA
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n. An empty space or a missing part; a gap.
A magical space immured by habit and convention. “Studying with a teacher, I learned that the intervals have meaning; they are not just sounds but they imply in their progressions a sound not actually present to the ear. Tonality. I never liked tonality. I worked at it. Studied it. But I never had any feeling for it: for instance: there are some progressions called deceptive cadences. The idea is this: progress in such a way as to imply the presence of a tone not actually present; then fool everyone by not landing on it – land somewhere else. What is being fooled? Not the ear but the mind. The whole question is very intellectual. However modern music still fascinated me with all its modern intervals. But in order to have them, the mind had it fixed so that one had to avoid having progressions that would make one think of sounds that were not actually present to the ear. Avoiding did not appeal to me. I began to see that the separation of mind and ear had spoiled the sounds, -- that a clean slate was necessary. This made me not only contemporary, but “avant-garde.” I used noises. They had not been intellectualized; the ear could hear them directly and didn’t have to go through any abstraction about them. I found that I liked noises even more than I liked intervals.” John Cage |
LOQUACIOUS
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adj. Talkative, garrulous.
Not applicable to the undoubtedly taciturn Mr Darcy: "For I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb." "This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure." said he. " How near it may be to mine, I cannot pretend to say. You think it a faithful portrait undoubtedly." – Jane Austen |
TELEMENTATION
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Language is the vehicle, ‘the great conduit,’ by which telementation takes place.
From John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” of 1690 in which he details the imperfections of language; the failure of telementation through obfuscation or the abuse of words, and the means of remedying these faults and deceptions by the use of definition, explanation, and illustration. |
SOPORIFIC
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adj. Causing or tending to cause sleep.
A treacherous beguilement of the noonday demon. |
DISAPPROBATION
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n. Moral disapproval; condemnation.
Disapprobation and opprobrium: moral words of which the full weight is only felt when enunciated by Stephen Fry as Jeeves. |
ALEATORY
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adj. Dependent on chance, luck, or uncertain outcome.
This is one of the words I inherited from John Cage. I was first introduced to his music during an Art History Lecture at the University of Edinburgh: that was also a happy accident. |
CHARIENTISM
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n. Gracefulness of style, expression of an unpleasant thing in an agreeable manner.
“If god didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” – Voltaire. Cf. Salimbene di Adam’s “Chronicles” describing the ‘forbidden experiment’ of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II. |
TACET
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n. A direction that the voice or instrument is to be silent for a time.
L. tacere, tacitus. Tace (Latin imperative): Be Still! Tacet in music. Tacit, taciturn, taciturnity. A misnomer for the author and orator Tacitus despite the enormous lacunae in the texts of his that survive. |
WHIGMALEERIE
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n. A fanciful decoration, ornament or contraption.
n. A whim, fanciful idea, fad. “Ah! it’s a brave kirk – nane o’ yere whig-maleeries and curliwurlies and opensteek hems about it – a’ solid weel-jointed mason-wark, that will stand as lang as the warld, keep hands and gunpowther aff it. It had amaist douncome lang syne at the Reformation, when they pu’d doun the kirks of St. Andrews and Perth, and therewa’, to cleanse them o’ Papery, and idolatry, and image worship, and surplices, and sic like rags o’ the muckle hure that sitteth on seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for her auld hinder end. Sae the commons o’ Renfrew, and o’ the Barony, and the Gorbals and a’ about, they behoved to come into Glasgow ae fair morning, to try their hand on purging the High Kirk o’ Popish nick-nackets.” – Sir Walter Scott |
EFFULGENT
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adj. Shining brilliantly; resplendent.
Ebullient off the boil. |
BORE
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v. To make weary by being dull, repetitive, tedious.
Goethe – monkeys would be worthy of being considered human beings if they were capable of being bored |
LALLAN
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adj. Belonging to the Lowlands of Scotland.
James Murray, the lallan editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. |
IMBRICATE
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v. tr. To arrange so that they overlap.
To the horizontal as immure is to the vertical. |
STRAVAIG
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v. To roam or wander aimlessly.
Dr Johnson’s sobriquet without his sense of purpose. |
GLAMOUR
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n. An air of compelling charm, romance, and excitement, especially when delusively alluring.
Originally a Scots word; it was introduced into the literary language by Sir Walter Scott. Etymologically, glamour is said to be a corrupt form of grammar. |
OWERWORD
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n. A chorus of a poem or song; a repeated saying.
Learn young, learn fair; learn old, learn mair. |
CAPERNOITED
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adj. (Scots) ‘Crabbed, irritable, peevish’ (Jamieson); slightly affected in the head by drinking, muddle-headed, wrong-headed.
“Fergusson uses this term when giving a pretty just picture of the general prevalence of dissipation in Edinburgh at the New Year.” – Jamieson’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language, 1808. “We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation” – Voltaire. |
ABDERIAN
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Given to excessive or incessant laughter.
Abderian is the opposite of agelastic: we ought to have words for degrees of laughter between the two extremes. |
MISOCAPNIST
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n. A person who hates tobacco smoke.
Roget, who seems to have been rupophobic, included ‘smoke’ in one of the longest entries in his thesaurus. It appears under ‘Uncleanness’ (653) with “dirt, filth, soil, slop, dust, cobweb, soot, smudge, smut, raff, and sordes.” |
VULGATE
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v. To put into general circulation
From the Latin, vulgare, to make public or common. Related to St. Jerome’s 4th century Vulgate: more plausible than the Septuagint, but not put into as wide a circulation as Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and its successor the King James Bible. Cf. Mendacious |
SCACCHIC
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adj. Of or pertaining to chess.
Samuel Beckett wanted the cover of his novel, Murphy, to be a photograph of two apes playing chess with the caption: “What you’re giving up your Queen? Sheer madness!” ‘Chess is the touchstone of the intellect’ – Goethe Cf. Bore |
APOPHATIC
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adj. Of or relating to the belief that God can be known only in terms of what He is not.
Necessary, but inadequate: after Heidegger. Cf. Charientism. |
EPIGONE
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n. a Second-rate imitator or follower, especially of an artist or philosopher.
Standing on the shoulders of giants: talent borrows, genius steals. |
AGNOSIA
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n. Inability to interpret sensations and thus recognise things.
Freud’s term for the loss of perception. According to Bishop Berkley ‘to be is to be perceived:’ physical objects exist only when a subject equipped with sense organs perceives them. The inability to perceive oneself thus poses a threat to existence. Cf. Cogito ergo sum. |
PETRICHOR
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n. A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry, weather in certain regions.
Blood from a stone: from the Greek, ‘petro’ meaning rock, and ‘ichor,’ the ethereal fluid supposed to flow like blood in the veins of the gods. |