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

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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Modding of I love TMI
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If ILTMI is not a place where this can happen, the inexhaustibly foolhardy transaction of insaniacked and deviant ideas (along with the ...

^^^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

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