For this, the inaugural post of A “Blog” If You Will, I feel that I, Nathan Langford, author of Chronicle and longtime trilobite enthusiast, should do something special. Perhaps I could show some pictures of fireworks or of the sadly extinct Golden Toad. Perhaps I could include a midi file playing “Deutschland Über Alles” in double time. But I will not do those things. Instead, I will give a list of some of my favorite words. Enjoy. And feel free to comment with some of your own favorite words.
- Gloaming
- Circumambulation
- Dolmen
- Antediluvian
- Avarice
- Clopen
- Portmanteau
I don’t know all of these words! As a mental exercise, I am going to attempt to define them all. Feel free to correct me.
Gloaming: I have heard this word before, but have only a vague recollection of what it means. So this may be completely off: Gloaming refers to the dark time of night after the sun has set but before the moon rises.
Circumambulation: I presume this means to walk around something, as in “I spent the morning idly circumambulating the lake before returning to my camp for lunch.”
Dolmen: I have never heard of this word before, so here is my best guess: A dolman is a mythical creature: half dolphin, half man. (plural = dolmen)
Antediluvian: Occurring before… the splitting of the catholic church into the roman catholic and eastern orthodox traditions? (I have no idea what diluvian means…)
Avarice = greed
Clopen: If my memory of topology serves me well, a set is called “clopen” when it is both closed and open, as in the case of the empty set or the universal set.
Portmanteau: A single word used in place of a two word phrase which is comprised of part (or all) of each word smooshed together. Ex: Brexit = British Exit.
You got all of them right except for dolmen and antediluvian.
Antediluvian-Before the flood (usually referring to Noah’s flood)
Dolmen-A type of neolithic structure sometimes referred to as a quoit or cromlech. It consists of a big rock on top of a couple of other big rocks. If that’s difficult to visualize, Wikipedia has an article on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmen
Ok, here are some of my favorite words:
Thistledown
Autumnal
Infinitesimal
Contrapositive
Smock
You can’t go wrong with smock. Smock smock smock.
I smack you with my smock.
By the way, did you know that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics; used as a way of talking about all these areas as connected to each other in education) wound up that way because they thought SMET sounded vaguely obscene?
That is amazing. And horrifying. A bit of both.