it’s possible i might have made up lexophilia
In reading a 25 page excerpt from a Benjamin Barber book, I have again been confronted with the untethered skill with which this man owns the dictionary. His vocabulary is ridiculous, so much so that I decided to write down every word I had to look up in an effort to document this savage display of lexophilia. Now, I’ll be the first to admit I probably should have known a few of these, but after stumbling upon “panglossian” I was disoriented to the point where I would have been lucky to recognize my own name.
Ze words:
inimical
panglossian
parochialism
demagoguery
riven
ironist
nexus
examplar
sobriquet
abjures
weal
panacea
It’s worth noting that the spell checker I am using doesn’t recognize three of these words; I’ll leave it to the reader as an exercise to determine which three.
|
Posted by Red Scott @ 7:35 pm
|
Comments Off on it’s possible i might have made up lexophilia
|
that’s nothing, i just got through a book with over 6 characters, and not a single set of parenthesis.
Comment by eugene — December 14, 2006 @ 7:52 pm
Panglossian… as in: of or relating to Pangloss, the character from Voltaire’s Candide?
I think I get a cookie.
Comment by whereami — December 15, 2006 @ 5:00 am
I’m going to go with panglossian, ironist… and that’s all I can come up with. I recognize the rest, though I couldn’t define most of them.
Comment by Daniel — December 15, 2006 @ 7:12 pm
Oh my, I was just looking up lexophilia because a friend accused me of being cursed with the “disorder”, I was thrilled to find there were only two of your list that I had wrong, though I think that disqualifies me as such. However, I would have you follow this link to find why ironist was not one that gave me difficulty!
http://www.cafepress.com/sg_016a, it’s a simple little design of mine using the irony mark proposed by Hervé Bazin. Thanks for the fun!!
Comment by Suzi — June 21, 2008 @ 9:40 am
No, “lexophilia” is inherent in the “Greek” part of English, it can be constructed by anyone needing a foreign-sounding variant of “word-lover”, that also have some elementary “Greek” part knowledge. Now instead consider “pneumatophagia”. *That* one is rare, since it has no reasonable interpretation.
Comment by tomas kindahl — October 9, 2009 @ 2:46 am