Caszh Blast 1 - Interesting Words
English is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the OED.
English has a staggering number of words. A cursory google search puts the count somewhere around a million different words, though this number does include the broad gamut (n. the complete range or scope of something. music: a complete scale of musical notes; the range of a voice or instrument) of scientific labels and chemical names which do not normally appear in even the least-abridged of dictionaries. The average North American English speaker may reasonably be expected to have a vocabulary of around 42,000 different lemmas (n. a heading indicating the subject of a dictionary entry) by the time they turn 20.
Even with 42,000 unique definitions under one’s belt, the sheer scope of the English language can make word puzzles challenging. I do a lot of crosswords. Crossword constructors have a habit of including esoteric (adj. intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest) answers in their grids, words whose sole purpose seems to be inflicting physical harm upon the solver. Whenever I bang my head on a new word in the NYT I look it up, write it down, and head down to the emergency ward at St. Joe's Hospital to get treated for the linguistic apoplexy (n. unconsciousness or incapacity resulting from a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke. informal: incapacity or speechlessness caused by extreme anger) this goddamn publication inflicts upon me every week.
Here are some cool words I found.
yegg | yeɡ |
noun North American English informal
a burglar or safecracker.
highfalutin | ˌhīfəˈlo͞otn | (also hifalutin, highfaluting | -tiNG |)
adjective informal
(especially of speech, writing, or ideas) pompous or pretentious: you don't want any highfalutin jargon or gobbledegook.
snafu | snaˈfo͞o | North American English informal
noun
• a confused or chaotic state; a mess: an enormous amount of my time is devoted to untangling snafus in the Sunday crossword.
adjective
• in utter confusion or chaos: as the lessons centre undergoes a change of leadership, day-to-day operations can be snafu.
verb [with object]
• throw (a situation) into chaos: the bass player at the jam decided to play the song in a different key than everyone else and totally snafued everything.
origin
1940s: acronym from "situation normal: all fouled (or fucked) up”.
ersatz | ˈerˌsäts, ˈerˌzats |
adjective
• (of a product) made or used as a substitute, typically an inferior one, for something else: Tim Hortons serves ersatz coffee, not like Locomotive Espresso.
• not real or genuine: the performers at my 5-year-old niece’s play were filled with ersatz emotion. boy, they were not sucking me into the story at all. I'm just saying this for their own benefit, I was very *aware* that I was watching a play.
august | ôˈɡəst |
adjective
respected and impressive: when I attend the Uline Collective jazz jams on Fridays, I am in august company.
quinquennial | kwiNGˈkwenēəl |
adjective
recurring every five years: the other day I had my quinquennial shower.
finagle | fəˈnāɡ(ə)l |
verb [with object] informal, mainly US English
• obtain (something) by devious or dishonest means: Drew finagled JPEGMAFIA tickets for, like, $20 each. I know there’s no openers, but that still seems crazy.
• [no object] act in a devious or dishonest manner: the throuple wrangled and finagled over who gets to sleep in the Big Bed and who gets the sofa.