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

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

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