What a word!

This very week I have come across ‘enshittification’! Meaning the gradual decline in quality of services on a digital platform or app as shareholders are prioritised over users and customers.
Also known as platform decay.
An excellent word in my experience. And very apt when applied literally as well as metaphorically to the water companies!

We don’t hear the word chortle nearly enough 😁

Supercalifragalisticexpealidocious?

ferry23

Onomatopoeia is a word that is reasonably well used. I would have thought fairly standard basic English Language learning

Who is it used by ferry ? 😁

Well, here is a new word:Persevilience
(combination of perseverance and resilience)

Invented by Alistair Campbell and the title of his latest book.

Persevilience (noun): the ability of an individual, group or organization to turn any situation, setback or meaningful experience into a positive opportunity to grow, to advance and secure their core interests.

Based on his personal experience. Apparently.
He has, as he puts it, "completed the morph" from alleged war criminal to "national treasure presenting the UK's number one podcast".

More words please ladies -
Here's another-reverie .
It means lost in a daydream .

Vespertine - relating to the evening.

*What’s for dinner’ in my childhood was answered with ‘ Pig’s feet and custard ‘.

Longdistancegrnny

I love the word 'petrichor' which is the smell you get after a shower of rain when it hasn't rained for a while - my son taught it to me a few years ago! There was not much call for that word this summer!

That word always strikes me as wrong, since it doesn’t sound at all like what it is!
Sounds to me as if it should mean the smell of a little bit of fuel spilt when you’re filling the car up.

As for words that sound exactly like what they mean, my favourite is the Russian for to giggle, which translates as roughly - some of the Russian alphabet has no English equivalent - heeheekats.

Orison - a prayer or a petition .
First heard of it in a Shakespeare play .

I'm another who loves the word petrichor. Having a 'favourite' word might be a bit silly, but if I have one, that is it 😁

Another word I like, which I only learned recently, is pareidolia.
AI describes it as "the psychological tendency to see meaningful shapes, faces, or patterns in random objects"

You know the sort of thing: where a piece of toast looks to someone like it has the face of Jesus on it, or you think a cloud looks like a rabbit.
I have some cheap bedroom furniture, and if I look at it for more than a few seconds, all the (fake) knots in the wood start to look like a dog's head to me, which I think is a typical example of this phenomenon.

As an avid bookworm all my life with a wide variety of things that I read so fiction from Jane Austen to Alexander McCall Smith, and a lot of non fiction, particularly all sorts of travels, I found lots of interesting words that I used to have to look up and then would find myself using quite a lot for a while. Years ago when we had an old yacht, we always took Scrabble, and a dictionary with us for wet moorings in the evenings.

However my son used to throw a hissy fit every so often, because he would declare my words were wrong, or that it wasnt fair as I was a lecturer and my postgrad was in TEFL, so "it wasnt fair" that I knew more words than he did. It was my cunning plan to say he could look up some unusual words that used high score letters for half an hour before we began playing. !! He had a love/hate relationship with the game, sometimes triumphing over me with a great new word and at other times flouncing off to go and read in his bunk muttering "not fair " He is 51 now and only the last time we met, we were talking about a trip to the Hebrides we had taken many years ago, when we had a horrible week of weather, where every day there was very little wind and far too much rain and cold, and scrabble and whist and other card games and new books were the saviour of the time. No mobile phones in those days!! Living on my own dont get much chance to do any scrabble these days . I cant remember which programme it is, might be Sorry I havent a Clue, where they have a fun bit where people give their version of the description of a word, which can be very funny, but of course right now I cant think of one example! Only that old chestnut in reply to "whats for dinner?" which is "Bread and pull it"

Marmin

As a retired english teacher I do love such generalisations as the one above.
I used to teach the word floccinaucinihilipilification in my first lesson with a class each September.
As for verisimilitude, it is also the title of a song by the Scottish band Teenage Fanclub.

Lol - whenever we came across a new word in our family we always used to say we'd found a "flocnoc" word.

Clearly I flew under the radar with versimilitude, but then I have to admit of never hearing of Teenage Fanclub - but good for them, clearly a band with a decent range of vocabulary!

As a retired english teacher I do love such generalisations as the one above.
I used to teach the word floccinaucinihilipilification in my first lesson with a class each September.
As for verisimilitude, it is also the title of a song by the Scottish band Teenage Fanclub.

In many years IT work, I must have created and/or edited hundreds of documents.

I've also just stopped being the editor (on a rota) of the village magazine, after about 30 years or so.

I don't recall seeing or needing 'verisimilitude' - plenty alternatives are available. I'd have a wager that most of the population hasn't a clue what it means.

Mind you, with the standard of education for the last 3 or 4 decades, that's hardly a high bar, is it?

WithNobsOnIt

I have always been interested in words and grew up with masses of words and expressions that have sadly, now bitten the dust.

As a nation we used to be very proud in the number of, and variety of words the English Language.

There was a lot of showing off in the use of words and who used them. Also TV Quiz Programs dedicated to words. Good fun

Versimilitude was used a lot by Arts Critics and Drama along with juxtaposition when discussing new works.

Some of the legal terms sounded very harsh Remember gross moral turpitude and assault and battery?

Gross moral turpitude... wonderful 😊

I love wonderful words too. I used to love the Readers Digest which used to have a quiz about less usual words. It almost made a visit to the GP worth it as they used to have the magazines in their waiting room.

I have always been interested in words and grew up with masses of words and expressions that have sadly, now bitten the dust.

As a nation we used to be very proud in the number of, and variety of words the English Language.

There was a lot of showing off in the use of words and who used them. Also TV Quiz Programs dedicated to words. Good fun

Versimilitude was used a lot by Arts Critics and Drama along with juxtaposition when discussing new works.

Some of the legal terms sounded very harsh Remember gross moral turpitude and assault and battery?

One of my favourite words for a while was ‘swive’. Relating to reaping. Until I found out it’s other meaning.

Keep them coming - really interesting!

DotScot

ferry23

I'm probably stretching things a bit putting this here, but I learnt a new word today and it's wonderful. I keep saying it -

verisimilitude -

perhaps everyone else knows this word, but I didn't. Just a wonderful word 🙂

I learned this word from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, where Poo Bah says he added 'merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative" (to explain why he added colourful and comically unbelievable detail to the fabricated story of Nanki-Poo's execution.)
Ah the days of G&S!

I'm a bit of a G&S fan myself. Love The Mikado - thank you DotScot for pointing that out.

And of course, no other word would do - it fits perfectly.

All those years it must have completely gone over my head !

Longdistancegrnny

I love the word 'petrichor' which is the smell you get after a shower of rain when it hasn't rained for a while - my son taught it to me a few years ago! There was not much call for that word this summer!

Lovely! But is this the same as what I call the smell of GREEN? When you walk in the woods after rain there is a gorgeous smell which I assumed was the wet leaves. I never connected it to soil because in my mind it's the smell of greenery. 🌳

Longdistancegrnny

I love the word 'petrichor' which is the smell you get after a shower of rain when it hasn't rained for a while - my son taught it to me a few years ago! There was not much call for that word this summer!

I’m a Dr Who fan and this came up in a couple of episodes back in 2011, fantastic word that I hadn’t heard before.
Isn’t the English language great!

I usually have a favourite word on the go. One of my favourites, at the moment, is recalcitrant. I use it every day when anything, or anybody, refuses to work properly or to co-operate e.g. I can't remove a lid? This lid is being recalcitrant! If I can't remember something? My head is being recalcitrant today! My sewing machine refuses to work properly? Damn this recalcitrant machine!

I've found using the dictionary option on a kindle very useful. Sometimes I look up words not often used that I think I know the meaning of to find the true meaning might actually be very slightly different. Sorry can't think of any examples.