New word!

[AliG]

This all reminds me of Douglas Adams' Meaning of Liff - although his is the fiction version of this thread. Funny though.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Apparently, the word Olid describes something that smells extremely unpleasant....how 'orrid!

 

[Paul Whybrow]

 

[Tim James]

Brilliant!

 

[Leonora]

How about ululate, a word that sounds a bit like its meaning? I'd love to use it in a story but hesitate for fear of annoying readers

I have an ululating dog in my WIP

 

[Tim James]

Ululate was the way that H G Wells described the Martian's "speech" in War of the Worlds.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I don't know how you'd drop this word into everyday conversation, but as we have enthusiastic cake bakers on the Colony, did you know that the correct name for one of the small silvered balls used to decorate a cake is a dragée?

I stumbled across it, while editing one of my old short stories, needing to check my Chambers dictionary to see if 'drag mark' is hyphenated...I hate hyphens!

Dragée is also used to describe a sweet or candy enclosing a drug, or a nut, or fruit, etc. Or, it's a chocolate drop or a medicated sweet (which probably shouldn't be used on a cake).

A French word, pronouncing it correctly makes the speaker sound seductive!

 

[Marc Joan]

A French word, pronouncing it correctly makes the speaker sound seductive!

Appropriately so?-: 'draguer' is French for 'chat up'...suspect dragee is pronounced with a soft g, though, unlike draguer. Hadn't come across dragees before, but I hope to in the future...

 

[Paul V]

Psithurism - very apt for this time of year. Scared the bejeebers out of me a few years ago whilst carrying out a bit of a grim task.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Psithurism while.........carrying out a bit of a grim task

Oh no ((((((((((

How sad, Paul.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I've just started reading Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project, part of which is the memoir of an uneducated young man, who freely confesses to the murders of three people. Set in 19th-century Scotland, the accused man uses many local dialect expressions, which are given their own glossary. I was delighted to see summer described as "the yellow months."

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I'm happily working my way through James Oswald's Inspector McLean crime series, that are set in Scotland, in which he uses various colloquialisms and local spellings of words to indicate accents.

One word that I haven't heard in England is guddle—meaning to feel for with the hands, when you're unsure what's in there—groping about or rummaging. He guddles in his pockets for coins or guddles in the car boot for a torch.

It's also a term to describe what some poachers call tickling—where the poacher lies on a river bank, hands in the water, palms upwards, waiting for a salmon or trout to rest overhead—gently caressing the underbelly sends the fish into a trance, making it easy to grab them or flip them out onto land, to be dispatched with a 'priest', a short club, from a blow to the head.

American fishermen in the Deep South use a similar blind reaching technique called 'noodling', where they feel for large powerful catfish under rocks. Jeremy Wade tried this in an episode of River Monsters:

 

[Paul Whybrow]

It’s been a while since any of us posted a new word, but I came across a phobia that’s got two names.

The fear of beautiful women is known as Venustraphobia or Caligynephobia.

From: Phobia List - The Ultimate List of Phobias and Fears

I wonder what a fear of literary agents is called….

 

[AliG]

I wonder what a fear of literary agents is called….

Normality

 

[CageSage]

I have a good one, and the meaning is clear without having to look it up: crapulence.
There's also crapulent, which is a bit different, but not too much.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

A new word to me, but one that @Robinne Weiss might know: cimicine—which means smelling of insects—as associated with bedbugs.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

A new word to me, but one that @Robinne Weiss might know: cimicine—which means smelling of insects—as associated with bedbugs.

Interesting it's used to describe the smell. Cimicine is one of the defensive compounds bedbugs and some other Hemipterans use (and, indeed, it has a smell). But looking at the origin of the word (the Latin cimex, meaning bedbug (Cimex is the genus name of bedbugs, too)), I suspect the descriptive term came first, and the compound was named afterwards. Cool! Now I'll have to use that word descriptively...

 

[E G Logan]

And very nicely written too. The quest is fundamental. We don't do enough questing.

Jean? Is that you?

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I chanced upon a nice-sounding word this evening while flipping through my Chambers Dictionary. A writer is unlikely to use it unless their story is based in the Mediterranean in the 18th or 19th centuries.

A mistico was a large sailing-vessel with long low hulls and two masts. In size, they were between a xebec and a felucca...which also sound pleasant. Feluccas are still common in the eastern Mediterrean.

A mistico

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Paralian...meaning someone who lives by the sea.

St Michael's Mount - Wikipedia

 

[Andrew Okey]

I recently discovered "captious" and was overjoyed because it perfectly fitted into some dialogue I was struggling to write

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Although I adore unusual words and sometimes use them in my writing, as, after all, that's how I developed a wide vocabulary, I do wonder sometimes if using posh words is off-putting to readers. It's one thing to use them as an embellishment and quite another to force them on the reader who loses the plot as they attempt to comprehend the meaning.

This doubt was brought home to me when I noticed in my weekly progress report from Grammarly, that I'd used "more unique words than 97% of users." A very small part of me thought "must try harder and bring that up to 100%", but I soon started to fret...was I being too grandiose? Damn, did it again! I think that my high percentage comes from the technical language and procedural jargon I use to do with forensics and police operations in my crime novels, rather than having my characters use grand language.

It's food for thought, though, as we're advised to keep things concise and simple.

 

[CageSage]

off-putting to readers

Do other people do what follows?
When I get out of the house (doesn't happen often, chained to the story), the places I go to usually involve a lot of waiting around. Usually with other people. Most of them seem to have some form of reading material.
I always talk to them, ask them what they like about what they're reading.
One comment has stuck with me through many, many others.
A woman reading Diana Gabaldon's famous series. What did she say?
"It's annoying to read so many $50 words that I don't understand. I won't bother with the next one."
This is a woman who has a book with her everywhere she goes. The exact target market for the series. And the one thing that turned her against that author? Too many big words that weren't easy to understand from context.
I keep that in mind every time I sit down. It doesn't stop me using the occasional unusual word, as long as it is understandable from the context and is appropriate for that moment in the story, for that character, and doesn't distract the reader from what's important. *touch wood*

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I delved into the interior of my new laptop today, to replace the hard drive with an SSD. This involved undoing fifteen small screws, then levering the back casing off the front part holding the keyboard. The two halves are clipped together, so pressure needs to be applied. It groaned alarmingly! As did I....

What I didn't have was a plastic spudger which wouldn't have left pry marks on the casing. I persevered with a broad-bladed screwdriver and a Watersons Bookstore loyalty card! Spudgers come in different shapes and sizes and colours, so I ordered two on eBay for 99p each. They're also useful for prying connectors out of the motherboard.

A spadger, on the other hand, is a colloquial name for a sparrow. Using one of those for prying would be cruel!

 

[Andrew Okey]

I delved into the interior of my new laptop today, to replace the hard drive with an SSD. This involved undoing fifteen small screws, then levering the back casing off the front part holding the keyboard. The two halves are clipped together, so pressure needs to be applied. It groaned alarmingly! As did I....

What I didn't have was a plastic spudger which wouldn't have left pry marks on the casing. I persevered with a broad-bladed screwdriver and a Watersons Bookstore loyalty card! Spudgers come in different shapes and sizes and colours, so I ordered two on eBay for 99p each. They're also useful for prying connectors out of the motherboard.

A spadger, on the other hand, is a colloquial name for a sparrow. Using one of those for prying would be cruel!

And surely a spudger is also now prime candidate to be the murder weapon in your next thriller?

 

[Paul Whybrow]

And surely a spudger is also now prime candidate to be the murder weapon in your next thriller?

That's not a bad idea! It reminds me of an episode of The Avengers, from 1966, called The Girl from Auntie, which rather traumatised me as a boy, as it featured a murderous old woman stabbing people with knitting needles!

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Two words new to me appeared in a short story and none of the dictionaries I consulted knows what they mean either!

I bought Cornish Short Stories: A Collection of Contemporary Cornish Writing for 50p in my local charity shop. Compiled by Emma Timpany and Felice Notley and published in 2018, its nineteen stories are “true to both their writers and to Cornwall.”

In a story titled The Siren of Treen, by Emma Staughton, a woman who’s survived a stroke which has affected the configuration of her face and vocal chords recalls how her dead husband used to look at her:

The face you loved to watch because it reminded you of wind on the water. You said you could see a squall approaching by the seech and gurnall of emotion riffling across my countenance, darkening my eyes and eddying around my mouth.

I also searched online for the meaning of seech and gurnall, but apart from them being family surnames, I found nothing. I wondered if they were Anglicisation of Cornish language words, which they might be, but I couldn’t find them. In the context of the story, seech resembles speech and gurnall might allude to gurning, the pulling of grotesque expressions.

It could be that the author invented them! Authors do that sort of thing.

I should track Emma Staughton down.

Any ideas?

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I’ve been upgrading my laptop recently, discovering new words, such as the aforementioned spudger and this evening I came across another one.

I’m about to swap a 128GB SSD for a 1TB SSD, one of the new slimline M2 types. Then, I’ll transfer my Linux Mint 19.3 operating system from the hard drive to the new SSD.

Checking how to do so, I read advice to make sure that Mint is as “cruft-free as possible” before transferring it. What?

The oracle that is Wikipedia says that cruft is a jargon word of unknown origin meaning “anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way. It is used particularly for defective, superseded, useless, superfluous, or dysfunctional elements in computer software."

Cruft - Wikipedia

I’m glad that it’s nothing to do with Crufts Dog Show, as I’m feeling lost enough as it is...and having less fun than this happy doggy.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I found a word new to me in an American magazine article. Skerrick is of British origin, but has fallen into disuse. It's more commonly used in North America and Australasia, meaning a minute quantity, a fragment or scrap of something, as in "Not a skerrick of food remained."

There's an American actor called Tom Skerritt, isn't there?

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Fubsy: meaning short and stout...portly.