Thread for words you never bothered to look up & one day you realized "I still don't know what that means"

air your secret shame here

inspired by lj's use of "callow" on another thread

ha that's what I thought this would be about! I don't know what callow means, either.

callow = lj

and i think he'd agree

when I was a teenager I thought "misanthropic" meant "physically misshapen" - this is the downside at having been good at guessing what words mean in context in kindergarten/1st grade I think

i looked up like 10 words this weekend, i feel much smarter tbh

insaniacked

^^ my new favorite word

heh. this is what i did as a young reader. dictionaries? pah. i can sense what words mean. this lead to an awful lot of said sensing while reading Austen, Dickens, Bronte etc. And consequently to this day i'm still looking up words i thought i knew a long time ago.

*looks up*

xp

i know what callow means because its definition is given in the film "mallrats" :/

to my great embarrassment just last week I thought "I love too much information" was slang for "I love making poop jokes"

I think the best thing I ever did was to read a children's dictionary from front to back when I was a kid

insaniacked

― ain't no thang but a chicken ㅋ (dyao), Sunday, April 4, 2010 10:19 PM (1 minute ago)

ok what is this??

oh yeah and there's sanguine, I waited for years for context to give up the goods on that one but I really wanted it to mean something bloodthirstier than it does

xp I dunno but abbott used it and it's an awesome word

a few weeks ago i saw "accession" in the NYT, cool word imo

sanguine is one of those words where it contains two meanings which contradict each other xxp

spelunking (until this weekend)

I want to introduce 'hilariated' to the english speaking world

i used to have persistent problems with "plenipotentiary" despite speaking a romance language that lets me know that the word is constructed of "full" and "powers".

i always thought a diuretic had to be something that made you poop--it just sounded to close to that other word

a diuretic a more advanced form of a diabetic iirc

spelunking (until this weekend)

― jihad mane (J0rdan S.), Sunday, April 4, 2010 10:24 PM (6 seconds ago)

def thought this was gonna be like, to soundly beat another in a competition

think u mean diaphoretic xpost

different language, but I always thought "preocupado" meant "busy" (busy is actually "ocupado") and I worked on a spanish-speaking unit and patients would ask me to take 'em on smoke break and I'd be like "ahora no, estoy muy preocupado" and finally one day one of my favorite coworkers was like "when they ask you for smoke break you always tell them 'not now, I'm really worried'" which did not make me feel embarazada because that word as it turns out means "pregnant"

which is a whole different story

looooooooooool

false friends are a bitch. "Mi padre me molesta mucho" a lot less alarming than you would assume etc.

lol

yeah my first experience with that stuff was as a teenage busboy, coworkers told me to go back to the kitchen and tell the cooks how much me gusta la verga

good times

recondite (used by a classmate once, to which I suffered an internal fit of envy/shame/derision/fury - would even now have to look up)
caliphate (some sort of Islamic term?)
atavistic (something about returning to the primal? often used to describe loud music?)

and loads of others I've either had to look up or haven't thought of right now

I got all FUCKED UP about the def. of "auspicious" because my first ex-boyfriend wrote me a letter about moving away from home & moving in w/some locavores. In it, he said they were trying to convert him to a Higher Order of peanut butter by noting that his Skippy had "an auspicious lack of actual peanuts." This made me think auspicious meant like "shady and evil in a way like the purloined letter that is so obvious you cannot see it until another points it out to you." It turns out auspicious means pleasant or happy, which I discovered after radically misusing it on this very board. It also turns out the first ingredient of Skippy is "peanuts."

my dad was telling me an anecdote, a very dad anecdote, about a problem he had with misunderstanding due to language barrier stuff. Being in brazil and being asked "estas con fome?" (are you hungry) and thinking it was the same as "estas conforme" (are you ok) in spanish and the people he was with being confused by him saying "yes i'm hungry" and then turning his nose up at any food offered to him.

I met a person with the surname Verga the other day! I didn't let on how amused i was with the name and why. A Romanian player came on as a substitute in a game against Barcelona in the Nou Camp a couple of weeks ago and his surname was Marica. cue much hilarity.

And "insaniacked" is a word I made up that means "to make (or to have made) something crazier."

oh god regarding your 'auspicious' tale my worst such error was using the word 'eponymous' to mean 'noble, gallant' as in 'eponymous hero' - used it to describe a footballer whose name was sadly not The Sport Of Soccer

guy in my school referred, in a high school newsletter type thing, to the gates of the school as euphoric. The piece was about taking stock and looking back on life at school at the end of the final year and i'm pretty sure he didn't mean to use it that way. unless he was taking eckies and standing round the gate listening to Robert Miles or something.

the english language needs to be culled imo

I agree, it's way too misanthropic & callow

Gaze upon this works ye dudes and depair:

This is a thread for sad ILXorres of any age

everytime I think that though I find out that for example 'diablerie' is a word and then I have deep regrets for thinking it in the first place

I misused it in ALL CAPS like "arrow to my hamartia ok thx."

NB: I may have subtly abused "hamartia" there. Consult a doctor before believing.

hahahahaha Abbott you just titled a song (two songs if we're throwing 'arrow to my hamartia' in as well) on some album I someday release

also I'm fucked if I know what presdigitation is, or if I've spelt it correctly

what is the other>?

For a long time I assumed "penultimate" meant super-ultimate, or awesomely dramatic or something like that. That seems so dumb now.

hamartia is kinda one's fatal error, so if misusing auspicious was your fatal error, all caps was the arrow protruding from its front that made the wound all the more grievous

other is AUSPICIOUSLY UNHAPPY obv

prestidigitation is when you have too many fingers and toes

http://www.foxnews.com/images/602485/0_61_feet_320.jpg

fucking knew it had an extra 'ti'

and maybe an extra 'toe' or two, too

thanks to this thread I just realised that I always assumed callow meant the same as sallow. duh!

Cimon Sallow

It's better than thing, as I once did, that callow meant the same thing as "tallow." Actually, in my mind, 'callow' does have the same yucky yellowish color of unrendered animal fat.

wow i have always had the meaning of atavistic utterly wrong, i thought it referred to... hunger, or something?

(i took the piss out of a friend for misusing 'ablutions' today so uh serves me right i guess)

thanks to today's NYT xword i now remember what 'obloquy' means and that it in fact has little to do with soliloquys or the stage in general

I never knew pulchritude meant what it did for a long time because wtf, it is such an ugly sounding word for "beauty"!!

this happens all the time when i'm reading french, leading to some really bad misinterpretations.

i always had this problem with "ubiquitous" when i was younger

obloquy

that's a great one! 'tis on my OKC profile that I am a fan of words ending in -quy (and was thinking of soliloquy, colloquy and obsequy) but one responder hit me with 'obloquy' which I sorta dimly recalled the existence of but hadn't considered

haha but the argument could be made that you are a fan of obloquy

some ppl are into that, just sayin

well, indeed! at least, I'm the richer for knowing - vocabulary is armoury (or perhaps armature...)

oh I got 'obtuse' wrong for YEARS

I never knew pulchritude meant what it did for a long time because wtf, it is such an ugly sounding word for "beauty"!!

A GRE "oppositeland strategy" word classic. Maybe the Platonic form of the thing.

i've looked up "hegemony" maybe once every three years since college and never really remember exactly what it means

bespoke

and there's another one that's on the tip of my tongue that i can never remember the meaning of

oh, academia is great for these:

ontology
epistemology

i've looked up "hegemony" maybe once every three years since college and never really remember exactly what it means
There are so, so many words exactly like this for me.

All sorts of incidents of misremembering or completely fucking up words while learning my second language have made me paranoid of misusing words in my own language. This thread has been reassuring though!

i looked up dissipated the other day and i thought i remembered it being something along the lines of like, the lack of humanity, but that's not what it is? words

it means to separate

looked up "reactionary" just a coupla weeks ago, the word and its history - spent 25+ years knowing nothing much aside from its right-wing slant.

also, a coupla years ago

...years ago, I learned the difference between cement and concrete

prestidigitation is when you have too many fingers and toes

No, that's polydactyly. Prestidigitation is magic tricks, sleigh of hand sort of things...remember the movie The Prestige?

aw kate, why won't you let me have my fun ;_;

nuthin funny about increasing your word power.

until two days ago i thought "peremptory" had something to do with the word "preempt."

http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/9996/wordpower.gif

atavism

thought 'eclectic' meant 'obscure'.

actually, in my mind, 'callow' does have the same yucky yellowish color of unrendered animal fat.

tallow is unrendered fat

atavism is great imo. i have a bunch of favourite words which are favourite because they feel relevant right now, cf multivalent, anomic, atavistic or maybe revanchist.

at the slight tangent that people have mentioned of looking up and forgetting things; spend a lot of time using the dictionary trying to differentiate between similar words; dour/sour, parallel/adjacent, etc.

also lol:

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^^^we need to use that word more

'recidivist' had me confused for ages

great thread!

in quiet moments i have turned to ilx for words to websterise & learn online, it's good to have another depository for them

I thought sallow meant pale in a way that could be complimentary. O shi.

this reminds me, when I went to apply for chinese courses at my uni, I wanted to explain to them that I was illiterate (couldn't read or write but could speak and hear pretty well). so I told them I was a 流氓 when I meant to say 文盲 - the former means bastard or hoodlum. ;_;

We must spread the word 'insaniacked' all over the interweb. I will do my part.

obdurate

learning new meanings for words you thought you knew is also key too for this thread. for example 'the standards obtain' etc.

i tried following the whole "hauntology" thing a few years ago and never really figured it out.

that's made up tho

http://www.dailypuppy.com/media/dogs/anonymous/pepper_pug.jpg

whiney always assumed "hauntology" was a red flag for "i'm a hackademic windbag" and unsubscribed all those blogs from my RSS reader

what bugs me are those phrases that are used in fancy-like writing that everybody seems to accept even tho they make no sense. like "must needs". what the fuck is that about.

xp lol well "hackademic" isn't that much better

yeah, jargon. bleh.

jargon is the opposite of copacetic in my experience

also very relieved to confirm that callow meant what I thought it meant, this thread had me hardcore second-guessing

?? jargon is great, wtf

gimme a bona fide colloquialism over corporate jargon any day of the week

jargon tends to be unnecessarily obfuscatory, it's basically like "this knowledge is all that makes me special, ergo I will make up a language for it so that I look prettier"

totes^^^

also lingo > > jargon

hauntology was late derrida's poisonouse gift to the english langauge, latterly revivified as terrible hackademic crit theory meme & silly english chillwave analog

poisonouse

sometimes jargon is a good and necessary thing, other times you have things like the medical profession's predilection towards turning everything under the sun into an acronym (commonly referred to by doctors as "TEUTSIAN").

hahaha derridas is trolling over in his grave

--for some reason had to always look up "self-aggrandizing" before deployment---could never remember if it was a good thing or a bad thing.

--embarrassingly misused "effete" once in HS but can't really remember the details

leave me out of this, HI DERE

haha sorry, I could throw daggers at the computer profession as well but instead of being funny it would just be sad and pathetic

"shop talk" >>> technical argot >>> lingo >>>>>>>>> jargon

by the way, I never knew what excelsior was until I came here, and even now I'm still mystified as to why it means what it currently means on this board

itt...wood shavings

i really, really love listening to professionals talkin in their secret pro twin talk

hantavirus intrauterine diuretically excreted relapse emissions, apparently

'quincunx'

i love acronyms

whoah had no idea about excelsior---always associated it with stan lee, tbh

language evolves because people want to express things easily. people who are engaged in a specific activity necessarily end up in their own linguistic sub-world. i don't think anyone comes up with jargon for the hell of it.

excelsior means higher and somebody used to shout it on a mtn? r something, dunno why it means what it means on ilx either

"excelsior" as used on this board means "that witty bon-mot so amused me that I spat tea onto my keyboard and shorted it out, giving myself enough of a shock in the process that I have also soiled myself and now have to explain to my boss why I need to buy emergency underwear and pants in the middle of the day without also tipping him/her to the fact that I waste all day making jokes on the internet instead of doing what they're paying me for"

idiolectal looool xenocentrism

Excelsior: also the motto of NY.

i don't think anyone comes up with jargon for the hell of it.

probably not, but some jargon can be used to conceal meaning from the uninitiated

language evolves because people wanna talk about the same shit in a different way

and i'm trying to think of an example of jargon that makes meaning "easier" for all involved

this thread is very informative btw

probably not, but some jargon can be used to conceal meaning from the uninitiated

boo hoo!

I think you meant "blood diamonds"

also, annoying abbreviations aside, i love the precision of medical language, even if it is dense. kinda have to walk a fine line between colloquial explanations and high-test medicalese, though, when telling patients stuff, i think---some ppl hear plain talk and think yr a quack (cf Louis CK's bit on "head full of cancer"), others hear impenetrable lingo and think yr a hoity-toity know-it-all a-hole

eh i think a lot of the time jargon comes from trying to have a word that more narrowly means something than its synonym but without partic baggage from other contexts that those synonyms are also used in that might confuse what u r talking abt.

american military pentagonese is the worst, full of wtf acronyms for scary weapons and strategies

interestingly enough, I think the density caused by the precision of medical language (which I also think is awesome) is a direct causal influence on its propensity towards acronyms (which I find kind of funny)

xp: oh yeah, nobody acronyms like the military, although there I can see a stronger reason for speaking in obfuscatory terms as it's basically like training your force to speak in cyphers

"jargon," to me, seems almost necessarily tied to obfuscation. like, it's a sort of code-switching that happens when some subset of ppl in the room want to have a conversation unencumbered by deference to ppl not in the know. or when they want to get "credit" for relaying information to someone (in the most precise way possible!) while knowing full well that the exact opposite has happened.

"lingo" or "shop-talk" is just the natural evolution of a profession's conversations with itself. it's basically just slang, but it enjoys a little more respect because its practitioners, you know, have jobs.

I remember finding out what 'two-tap' means in the context of the military and being disgusted by the bro-iness of it all

FUGAZI

The most impenetrable jargon I've ever encountered is poker jargon.

so jargon is annoying, but lingo, technical terms and shop talk are good, even thought they're the same thing

vernacular >>> argot >>> jargon >>> lingo

also I was just fkn waiting for nakhchivan to find this thread, goddamn

the third definition of "jargon" on MW is amazing:

obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words

"jargon," to me, seems almost necessarily tied to obfuscation. like, it's a sort of code-switching that happens when some subset of ppl in the room want to have a conversation unencumbered by deference to ppl not in the know. or when they want to get "credit" for relaying information to someone (in the most precise way possible!) while knowing full well that the exact opposite has happened.

this is why i don't rly think of medical language as jargon, it's sort of unavoidable that science needs acronyms and neologisms whereas marketing probably doesn't

exactly--i'll take medical jargon over business jargon any day of the week

both of those jargons should be in quotes

business jargon is used to justify the speaker's fukkin existence, imo (see also the shamelessly self-aggrandizing (!) language deployed by the "design community"). most other jargon is used to streamline conversation and, also imo, deliberately exclude non-practitioners.

i dunno, business jargon doesn't really bother me either, anymore. it's all meant to express something. medicine has its own very specific technical-expression needs and so the language follows. business has more social information that people want to get across -- mostly saying-without-saying kind of bs -- alongside whatever factual or technical thing is being communicated. that's fine.

business has more social information that people want to get across -- mostly saying-without-saying kind of bs -- alongside whatever factual or technical thing is being communicated. that's fine.

bs! exactly.

xp yeah I agree with that goole - that's some nice blue-sky thinkin you're generating

i mean yeah, i find the whole thing hateful and abusive of the King's English and all, but i've never had to corral a bunch of people who don't care or flat out don't like each other to make something that nobody on earth really cares about, for money, and that's basically the world of quote-unquote productive enterprise. no wonder the language gets mangled.

i have been told to "action this going forward" by someone who meant "do this now".

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

there ya go. bullshit!

ha i guess i'm lucky enough to have avoided that kind of heavy businessese so far

distinction of jargon from technical language, no? (fuckin many xposts) altho I'm stupid enough to think that what even many of the wackier cont. phil. folks are doing could be described as technical writing.

poisonouse

I looked this up. Ought've read next post.

dude i am telling you the shit that people will say when they are trying to explain to a client why they made a logo/layout look a certain way (ie why it cost so much $$$$) would make you self-harm

yeah well people sure can get lost in their own world, especially when they think they ought to be paid. that's the danger i guess, jargon insulates you from thinking, rather than speeding up the process. and when you hit a difficult spot, it's like a panic button that doesn't do anything anymore. "b-but i'm LEVERAGING here"

patients would ask me to take 'em on smoke break and I'd be like "ahora no, estoy muy preocupado"

lmao this is awesome

"Action this going forward" sounds like the birth of a new language.

As in the syntax starting to tear completely away from standard English.

'action it going forward year on year' to give it it's full due.

I'm pretty sure that is code for "kick me in the neck"

lol

LETHAL WEAPON 7: ACTION THIS

ameliorate

heh insufferably tempted to just post what these words all mean as they come up, which would garner huge sb action

hahaha I am right there with you on that

thread of not using Google

but i mean seriously who doesn't know what ameliorate means

^ sb

I thought ameliorate was what you do on yelp

ameliorate = a lecture given by an acne-ridden teenager

it's a site for grading disappearances over the atlantic

uh...pacific?

yeah pacific

get your dead American female pilot deaths straight

mine was better

i don't get yours

hey there's fuck all evidence that earhart died over the pacific, lay offa me

a mealy orate

mealy = acne ridden??

a me a li or a te

(sound of music sequel)

hey there's fuck all evidence that earhart died over the pacific, lay offa me

well sure, but she certainly didn't die anywhere near THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

land, survive, float, starve

there's a helluva CSI: 1920's episode waiting to be written right there

darragh's post would work better if the word was spelled atitanicorate

eh 1930's.

1940 by the time she'da starved, maybe. anyway, that's not important.

darragh's posts would work better if there was a 'fact' equivalent of spellcheck

it's called google iirc

know your oceans, read your blogs

you want to integrate google factchecker, talk to keith.

best you go through tuomas tho

I used "felicity" today, then had a moment of doubt and decided I should have said "facility". But they totally can mean the same thing!

fellacity

is that like dudetown

Here's one:

I can't seem to find the correct definition of the term "cosmic joke", which I understand relates to something specific, as opposed to well, gags about space aliens.

Ayn Rand used this (very minor part of the plot) of The Fountainhead to explain a "cosmic joke":

Keating reads a book by Lois Cook, and reasons that it must be very deep indeed, since he doesn't understand it. Keating meets with Lois Cook. She makes him uncomfortable; he tries to compliment her on her book, but she replies that it's tiresome to be understood by everyone. For her house she wants something ugly, simply for the sake of going against what is thought to be beautiful. Keating (an architect) tries to object, but takes the commission. When it is built, (a syndicated critic named ) Toohey refers to it as "a cosmic joke."
http://www.bookrags.com/notes/fou/PART19…

It was a joke on Keating because Keating didn't understand what had happened, but Toohey did.

hilarious imo

yeah, that was the only definition I could find, but it seemed rather contrived and WTF to be honest.

what makes you think it is a thing? did you read the rest of that yahoo answers page?

late on this but: always assumed excelsior was the stan lee ref which in turn I think ref'd the longfellow poem

I thought a cosmic joke was something in the vein of a Kafkaesque mockery at the hands of the universe at large.

choate/inchoate

x-post
Yeah, kind of a Depeche Mode "Blasphemous Rumours" thing.

"...But I think that God's got a sick sense of humor
And when I die I expect to find Him laughing."

choate/inchoate

otm

here's Scalia's take on choate

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E3D91339F930A35752C0A9669D8B63

assay!

scalia needs a slap if that's where his attention is during arguments

slap!-

'don't interrupt me when my sentence is inchaote, beyotch'

wile e chaote