Tickled My Fancy

I’ve got a thing for words, I’m pretty sure people know that. Since 2013 began, it seems I’ve been stumbling across so many different ones that make me happy. Here’s a sampling.

~Uxorious, which means excessively devoted to one’s wife

~Maritorious, which means excessively devoted to one’s husband

~filipendulous, hanging by a thread

~pogonotrophy, the act of growing and grooming facial hair

~zugzwang, being in a position where any move you make will cause you to lose (or have problems) – this is also a baader-meinhof because I recently heard this word in a television show, Criminal Minds, then bam! it popped up in my word of the day email. (Similar to this morning’s schadenfreude story, except I knew that word, so it was not a bm, but instead was synchronicity).

~ktenology, the science of putting people to death

~tarantism, the uncontrollable urge to dance

~scripturient, the violent need to write

And then there were series of related words. The first is time words:

~overmorrow, relating to the day after tomorrow

~hodiernal, relating to today

~hesternal, relating to yesterday

~nudiustertian, relating to the day before yesterday

~yestreen, yesterday evening.

Then, for fun, series words about series:

~penultimate, the next to last (I already knew this one, but I did NOT know)

~antepenultimate, the third to last

~preantepenultimate, the fourth to last

~ultrapreantepenultimate, the fifth to last (there is some dispute as to whether this is an actual term, but I keep seeing it)

The musical series:

~quaver, an eighth note

~semiquaver, a sixteenth note

~semidemiquaver, a thirty-second note

~hemidemisemiquaver, a sixty-fourth note

~quasihemidemisemiquaver, a one hundred twenty-eighth note (I found this under the heading “Prefixes gone wild”)

The seasonal series:

~vernal, relating to spring

~autumnal, relating to fall

Truthfully, I knew both of those. The vernal and autumnal equinoxes took care of that. However, have you ever wondered about the other two seasons?

~hiemal, relating to winter

~estival, relating to summer

And the group series:

~monad, a single unit

~dyad, a pair

~triad, a group of three

~tetrad, a group of four

~pentad, a group of five

~hexad, a group of  six

~hebdomad, a group of seven

~ogdoad, a group of eight

~ennead, a group of nine

~decad, a group of ten (from whence we get the word decade…)

~hendecad, a group of eleven

~dodecad, a group of twelve (from whence we get the word dodecahedron- or a twelve sided figure)

I could do this all day. There is little I love more than finding strange and bizarre words to help explain the world around me. Everything on here tickled my fancy, hopefully you found a little something fun for yourself. Pop into the comments and tell me which new word (or series of words) you like the best.

And this morning, a co-worker came to chat and said, “What kind of dinosaur knows a lot of words?”

“A Thesaurus”

Yuk-yuk.

Lastly, I’ll top it off with a quote I recently read. It was so appropriate I am thinking of making it my life motto. “This is the sort of thing that is extremely interesting if you are interested in this sort of thing.”

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