• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

New word!

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.
I came across a word new to me in a crime novel I've just started reading. Ray Celestin's The Axeman's Jazz deservedly won the CWA New Blood Dagger for best debut crime novel of the year, and was featured on numerous Books of the Year lists.

In describing a street scene in New Orleans, he mentions colporteurs, which are street sellers of books, pamphlets and other publications.

Colportage - Wikipedia

Once carried by horse or covered waggon, I wondered if we'll see a resurgence of this trade after the crisis is over. Not every closed bookshop will weather the storm. Barnes & Noble was already in financial trouble.

It could be that we writers will become street peddlers to support our online sales.

iu

(not me!)
 
I started reading Marcel Pagnol's My Father's Glory last night, encountering an unusual word in a section about teachers leaving college to educate the rural poor:

"Then, by a sort of dehiscence, the good seeds would be squirted to the four corners of the département, to battle against ignorance, glorify the Republic, and keep their hats on when religious processions passed."

It turns out that dehiscence is a medical term, used to describe a wound's stitches splitting apart revealing the innards. Or, it can be used botanically for a seed pod splitting to release its seeds.

iu
 
Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Not a new word, but an amusing meaning of the Mandarin Chinese symbols for a penguin:

Is there a term for the grammatical equivalent of a Freudian slip? I'm learning Japanese and keep running into these.

Yesterday I heard a new definition for a word that really spoke to me. There's a thing called "imposter syndrome," where people feel that they're only pretending to be good enough for whatever job they're doing. This is apparently very common among MIT students and CEOs. The book I was reading yesterday related this to a more common, older word: shame. It's where you feel you should be apologetic to everyone around you for thinking you're good enough.
 
Is there a term for the grammatical equivalent of a Freudian slip? I'm learning Japanese and keep running into these.

Yesterday I heard a new definition for a word that really spoke to me. There's a thing called "imposter syndrome," where people feel that they're only pretending to be good enough for whatever job they're doing. This is apparently very common among MIT students and CEOs. The book I was reading yesterday related this to a more common, older word: shame. It's where you feel you should be apologetic to everyone around you for thinking you're good enough.
parapraxis? I hope that's the one you're looking for.
parapraxis - a minor inadvertent mistake usually observed in speech or writing or in small accidents or memory lapses etc. slip-up, miscue, slip.
 
parapraxis - a minor inadvertent mistake usually observed in speech or writing or in small accidents or memory lapses etc. slip-up, miscue, slip.

Sorry, no, I was being imprecise. I meant the etymological equivalent of a freudian slip. While learning Japanese, my daughter wondered that she had never realized that triangle literally meant "three corners" (Japanese has the same concept). Their term for "reality" involves the kanji "book correct," which suggests a subconscious preference for the written down vs. the objectively observed. This gets into Sapir-Whorf theory, but I think it gets at what I'm looking for.

I suspect that this kind of linguistic bias is what drives politically correct language, but maybe we don't have a word for it.
 
In that one, you're on your own. My father spoke Japanese (lived there for years) but he's no longer here, so I can't ask him. Somehow, I expect he'd say that any form of error that may occur (words are not alone) would not be acknowledged so the person doing it may not be embarrassed by the slip.
 
A new word for 2020: Doomscrolling

From Merriam-Webster:

Doomscrolling and doomsurfing are new terms referring to the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Many people are finding themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19 without the ability to stop or step back.
 
Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
I like the sound of this word—Darg—which appeared in dictionary.com’s word of the day.

The etymology of Darg includes ‘dark’ and 'daywork’ and it’s still used in Northern England and Scotland, though it sounds to me like something that a prehistoric man would grunt on returning to his cave and greeting his wife!

caveman-funny-cartoon-character-illustration_20412-406.jpg
Yeah, we say "Oh God, that's gonny be a real drag." or younger generation: "total drag!"
 
Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest Articles By Litopians

  • Advertising and Social Media
    There has been much discussion in writing circles about how much a writer has to self-promote these ...
  • Future Abstract: Fights at Night
    SATIRE ALERT: The following abstract is entirely fictional and does not represent actual events or s ...
  • Great Novel Openings Quiz
    As writers, we all know how important it is to grip the reader from the very start. Intriguing, surp ...
  • In The Summertime
    In the early seventies, I had a semi-Afro hairstyle and a shaggy beard. . I thought I looked like th ...
  • Working with a Literary Agent
    The Querying In a previous post I mentioned that I was back in the query trenches. To recap, my earl ...
  • Danger! Danger!
    What is perhaps the most feared creature of the Borneo rainforest, I hear you ask? Who is the King o ...
  • The World Has Missed You
         May 2021… COVID lockdown restrictions had eased, so Mrs Treaclechops and I headed to the I ...
Back
Top