That’s the word for it – Page 3

That’s the Word For it: Profluent

This word has Middle English and Latin roots and has to do with flow. You could use the word to describe music or a piece of writing. Here’s an example of how the word can be used.

“A few years later, when I learned that Jayne Anne founded the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark, I had to apply. She was the program’s director, and also taught fiction workshops. I loved being in her classes. We read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Fat City by Leonard Gardner, and she showed us the songs of their lines. Lines was the word she used to describe sentences. No matter their construction, sentences were to be linear and profluent. Subject, verb, object.”- Nick Ripatrazone, Is Line Editing a Lost Art?

That’s the Word For it: Plangent

The etymology of the word plangent is fascinating. This word with mournful connotations takes its origin from the Latin plangere which translates as the lamentations of beating the breast. The word is used a great deal in describing music but can be used with a sigh to talk about calamitous political situations and emotional dramas.

Here are some literary instances of the word:

“Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“To this waltz, born in a distant, snowbound country out of longing for just such a flower-scented summer night as this, Rupert and Anna dance. They were under no illusions. The glittering chandeliers, the gold mirrors with their draped acanthus leaves, the plangent violins might be the stuff of romance, but this was no romance. It was a moment in a lifeboat before it sank beneath the waves; a walk across the sunlit courtyard towards the firing squad. This waltz was all they had.”
― Eva Ibbotson, A Countess Below Stairs

That’s the Word For it: Excuplate

Exculpate is a word that is trending right now. This word traces back to the Latin culpa where the meaning of blame is embedded. Some literary examples of this word…

“Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility kind of a cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is—was—a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But, of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The notion that evil is non-rational is a more significant claim for Eagleton than at first appears, because he is (in this book [On Evil] as in others of his recent ‘late period’ prolific burst) anxious to rewrite theology: God (whom he elsewhere tells us is nonexistent, but this is no barrier to his being lots of other things for Eagleton too, among them Important) is not to be regarded as rational: with reference to the Book of Job Eagleton says, ‘To ask after God’s reasons for allowing evil, so [some theologians] claim, is to imagine him as some kind of rational or moral being, which is the last thing he is.’ This is priceless: with one bound God is free of responsibility for ‘natural evil’—childhood cancers, tsunamis that kill tens of thousands—and for moral evil also even though ‘he’ is CEO of the company that purposely manufactured its perpetrators; and ‘he’ is incidentally exculpated from blame for the hideous treatment meted out to Job.”
― A.C. Grayling

That’s the Word for It: Normative

Normative is not the same as normal. According to sociologists, unlike norm or normal, normative has a morally endorsed component to it and refers to.

This word is usually found in highly charged pieces. Check these out:

“Deviant’ is the weapon of the normative to discredit and demonize the Other.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Beloved, to be white is to know that you have at your own hand, or by extension, through institutionalized means, the power to take black life with impunity. It’s the power of life and death that gives whiteness its force, its imperative. White life is worth more than black life. This is why the cry “Black Lives Matter” angers you so greatly, why it is utterly offensive and effortlessly revolutionary. It takes aim at white innocence and insists on uncovering the lie of its neutrality, its naturalness, its normalcy, its normativity. The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, “Yes, you’re right. In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours.” But that is a tough thing for most of you to do.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

That’s the Word for It: Eructation

This fancy version of the burp came into use in the fifteenth century. Eructation is a medical problem for some and mostly it’s an expression of a satisfied stomach.

The word has been used in books in interesting ways:

“Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently crystallize.”
― Walt Whitman

“Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of—slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one—who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

That’s the Word For it: Spelunker

A spelunker is a Latin sounding term for caver. According to Merriam Webster, the word came into adventure sport lingo because of the author and outdoorsman Clair Willard Perry.

The word seems to be used a great deal in literature:

“I have no special desire to go crawl around in caves, but I really like the word [spelunking] and want to use it in conversation. I do a lot of things just to use words I like.”
― Evan Mandery, First Contact-Or, It’s Later Than You Think

“I love vocab. It’s like spelunking in a cave you’ve been in your whole life and discovering a thousand new tunnels.”
― A.S. King, Please Ignore Vera Dietz

That’s the Word for It: Matutolypea

Matutolypea is the scientific equivalent of getting up from the wrong side of bed. It’s the grumpy cat syndrome that happens when you wake up. The word hasn’t yet entered mainstream dictionaries but it’s one of those obscure words that has gained some popularity on the internet.

This word doesn’t seem to be very popular on any writer’s list. Managed to locate just one usage:

“Well,” Opal said. “I put the pamphlet up because it felt better than doing nothing. We’ll see.”

I nodded, but perhaps not brightly enough.

“Oh my,” she said. “I thought I cheered you up, but I still see a glum expression. Is this a case of matutolypea?”

“Matu-whato?”

Now, now–the English teacher! Surely you know what that means? Or are you having a case of the mubble-fubbles?”

Gillian Roberts, All’s Well That Ends

That’s the Word for It: Amanuensis

The most famous amanuensis in Indian mythology is Lord Ganesh, the scribe who wrote the Ramayana to Vyasa’s dictation. The word originally comes from the Latin word for slave or within arm’s reach. Tertius was the scribe who composed the Book of Romans to Apostle Paul’s directive. This concept of a scribe who took down important notes developed into what we now call a secretary. The academic connotations of amanuensis refer to the scribe who helps the disabled person or invalid during an examination.

Some examples of this word in literature:

“Every writer is the amanuensis to their characters”
— Lucy Coats

“I first noticed this as a child: too much happiness bored me. If I went for a walk on a sunny morning and began to experience an increasing sense of sheer joy, there came a point at which I grew tired of it and deliberately brought my mind back down to earth. Thinking about this later I always found it difficult to understand why I wanted that happiness to come to an end. Now the solution is obvious. When we experience a sudden insight we want to grasp it, to turn it into words. But the left brain is like an amanuensis who has to take everything down in longhand. If the intuitions come too fast he wants to shout, ‘Slow down, slow down!’ And if the speaker refuses to slow down he throws down his pen in disgust.”
— Colin Wilson (Beyond the Occult: Twenty Years’ Research into the Paranormal)

That’s the Word For It: Contronym

Have you ever thought about why fast means quick and at the same time means to immobilize? When a word or phrase means its opposite as well, it is called a contronym. Slang employs this kind of inversion of meaning, take for instance the word ‘sick’ or ‘wicked’ now used to convey something awesome or cool.

Here’s a list of contronyms.

Check out this usage of the word:

Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up with contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a contronym. Sanction, for instance, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done. Cleave can mean cut in half or stick together. A sanguine person is either hotheaded and bloodthirsty or calm and cheerful. Something that is fast is either stuck firmly or moving quickly.— Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue, 1990

That’s the Word for It: Parsimonious

Parsimonious refers to frugality and it also means making a minimum number of assumptions. The sports reference is to not conceding goals.

Here are some mentions of the word in literature.

“Earthly nature may be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal, itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly an object of wonder.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“You have read Darwin,” I said. “But you read him misunderstandingly when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions your wanton destruction of life.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You know you only mean that in relation to human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish you destroy as much as I or any other man. And human life is in no wise different, though you feel it is and think that you reason why it is. Why should I be parsimonious with this life which is cheap and without value? There are more sailors than there are ships on the sea for them, more workers than there are factories or machines for them. Why, you who live on the land know that you house your poor people in the slums of cities and loose famine and pestilence upon them, and that there still remain more poor people, dying for want of a crust of bread and a bit of meat (which is life destroyed), than you know what to do with. Have you ever seen the London dockers fighting like wild beasts for a chance to work?”
― Jack London, The Sea Wolf By Jack London