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

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

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