Posts by author
Sara Menuck
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Word of the Day: Eidolism
(n.); belief in ghosts; etymology difficult to trace, but typically attributed to the Greek eidolon (“image, apparition, phantom, ghost”) There was something else in the house, unmentioned and unlabelled. A sort of shadowy presence that hovered by the back door.…
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Word of the Day: Logodaedaly
(n.); cunning in words; skill in adorning speech; the arbitrary or capricious coinage of words; from late Latin and Greek, log (“speech, word”) and daidalos (“skillful, ingeniously formed) Every society we’ve ever known has had poetry, and should the day…
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Word of the Day: Nubivagant
(adj.) wandering through or amongst the clouds; moving through air; from the Latin nubes (“cloud”) and vagant (“wandering”), c. 1656. I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw…
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Word of the Day: Kakorrhaphiophobia
(n.) an abnormal fear of failure or defeat; from the Greek kakos (“bad, evil”); syn. atychiphobia Everybody in L.A. fails. We just do. —Moby, from “Creativity and Freedom to Fail” Maria Popova of Brainpickings pertinently asks in her March 2014 review…
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Word of the Day: Didapper
(n.) commonly, a little grebe or dabchick, a small water bird that dives underwater; also, a name for someone who disappears for a time before bobbing up again His papers looked organized, from the outside, they weren’t messy, but there…
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Word of the Day: Emberlucock
(v.) to confuse or bewilder (nonce-word accredited to Rabelais, c. 1469) (adj.) turmoiled, blundered or pestered, as the brain about a troublesome business (as defined by Randle Cotgrave, c. 1611) Ha, for favour sake, I beseech you, never emberlucock or…
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Word of the Day: Tantivy
(adv.) at full gallop; headlong. Spain, on the other hand, were dour; their defenders sloughed around, enervated and out-sprinted, as though they carried their own urns in their arms. The midfield couldn’t conduct the chorus — they were, as Keats…
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Word of the Day: Ucalegon
(n.) a neighbor whose house is on fire; from the Ancient Greek character Ucalegon, an Elder of Troy whose house was set on fire by the Achaeans when they invaded the city. Accomack is a small county that looked half-gutted…
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Word of the Day: Adoxography
(n.) skilled writing in praise of trivial or unpleasant subjects When people in a privileged society look deep within themselves to find what is missing, a streamlined clothes-cleaning experience comes up a lot. More often than not, the people who…
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Word of the Day: Recrudescence
(n.) breaking out afresh or into renewed activity; from the Latin recrudescere (“to become raw again”) The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk…