Teach me a Word!

Omg also, I love all the words AI have stolen 😭😭😭 Or at least I used to, now I hate them and it's so sad. Tapestry, Melody... all those ones. Such good words before...

Petrichor is my new fav word and it is the earthy smell after rain! It feels very Ethereal to me.

OHHH! Mackenzie, may I just say how SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICALLY-ESPIALIDOSHOUS-LY wonderful this story is. I actually used to read the dictionary, and the colors and letter and numbers, I identify with. I use words and I can taste the beauty of them, the sheer pleasure of using them is divine. Transcendental, preternatural, supernatural and mystical.

My French is not perfect, but I know the term "Jouissance" does not translate perfectly into English. It is used to define a very extreme form of bliss...usually sexual. Ha, ha... So, Top Story, you say? 🏅

Great job and Congratulations on your Top Story and New Words 💬 ❤️💯✌️🎉📝

I love learning new words, even if most of them never stick in my memory for long. Some words I collect are probably obvious to native speakers (since I’m not one); but many of them are rather rare. I also love learning etymologies; and they help with memorization. (A sampling of some of my recent discoveries: ‘nutant’, ‘reboant’, ‘rostrate’, ‘style [as gnomon]’, ‘spinet’, ‘toggery’, ‘dyspeptic’ [as temperament], ‘pilgrim’ [in the back of a bonnet], ‘prie-dieu’, ‘obloquy’.) ––– I have a soft spot for hard, monosyllabic vocables: (lesser-known meanings for) brusque, blunt Anglo-Saxon words. A gorgeous example is ‘scud’, for “light clouds driven rapidly before the wind” & other meanings. Is this not the essence of poetry: to convey much by minimal means? In that sense, ‘scud’ is plenty poetic. (Those short words also tend to be surpassingly polysemic, steeped in history – fecund, then, for poetry.) And while harsh or angular in their reticence, they exude the sort of focused force that I admire in all the arts: something like the brutality of a Pollock blotch, the raucous beauty of Tom Waits beat-boxing. ‘Ruck’, ‘crag’, ‘crab’, ‘rook’, ‘crow’ ––– muscular music to my ears, the British brawn of a Teutonic tongue! ––– As for words difficult to translate, here’s one from French – with one mouthful of a meaning: ‘Gribouille’: a naïve, foolish person who rushes into greater difficulties to avoid smaller ones. ––– One word I find beautiful is ‘gloom’ – in whose dusky dark may loom (by impending) sheer blackness. Its ‘l’ and ‘m’ are a dulcet delight – they *mollify* the vocable – but the ‘g’ gives it a slight, incipient edge. ‘Murk’ too is pulchritudinous (*physically* pretty, precisely: in sound & graph), being another Anglo-Saxon nigh-grunt, exiguous in letters, with a perfect balance of the softness of the ‘m’ and the hardness of the ‘k’. ––– A lesson passed on in a single word: ‘sequacity’, to avoid – in the sense of a servile credulity of the mind. I scout [= spurn] sequacity – for it makes people fall prey to ideologies, at worst excuse or commit violence; and at best it breeds arrant conformity. A sequacious worldview is a parcel [= bad batch] of dogmas. ––– *nerdiness intensifies* “You may know some words; but give me one” – I’d keleusmatically tell my nemesis, not without [litotes] persiflage – “only found in an incunabulum!”

Ah, yes, new words. I am in love with the word "brae," which I recently learned from reading a Lemony Snicket book. I had absolutely positively never heard the word before, and upon stumbling across the fact that it means "hill," I have stopped using the world "hill" almost completely. "Brae" sounds so more convicting and mysterious, and perhaps not many people know of the word. "Brae" reminds me of horses, or a stable, maybe... and galloping down the gentle slope of a mountain (or brae, hah). I love this word. You?

Amazing

Ohhh, Mackenzie, this is an incredible prompt! I’ll be meditating on this, and I can’t wait to read the comment section! 💫💞

Eldritch! And lugubrious! My two favorite words!

Great article and I'm loving the comments. My favourite words are usually inappropriate ones, so I'll bow out.. Congrats on the TS.

A word that blew my mind: galimatias. Sounds tricky, doesn't it? It actually means ''gobbledygook'' or nonsense. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gobbledygook

Congrats on Top Story, now you'll really get a deluge of new words! :)

Oh, I love this idea so much, Mackenzie! 🥹❤️ I adore learning new words as well and incorporating them into my work. There are soo many new words I've experimented with recently in poetry - one that immediately comes to mind is "amaranthine", which I used in my poem "The Legacy of Sound". I love this word for so many reasons. 1) I think it's just a gorgeous-sounding word - pleasing to the ear! 2) It has a lovely meaning: "beautiful and unfading; everlasting." 3) Spanish is my second language, and I see how this word was derived from Latin: "amar" in Spanish means "to love". 4) I adored your mention of how you associate words and letters with colors. Amaranthine actually also means "a deep, purple-red color". 😍 At least in my mind, this is very fitting! I feel like "Amaranthine" could even be the name of a gemstone. 🤗

I don't think this word fit any of your prompts above. So I'll just say it, lol. I came across the word Cantankerous in one of Cathy's poem and I fell in love with that word! It describes one part of me very accurately, lol!

In Belarusian there's a word for a shooting star: 'Znička'. I find it beautiful and unique, 'cause there are not many languages that have the word for it (I cannot name any; German doesn't count lol). I used to be that crazy guy 'reading' a dictionary and taking notes some time during middle school I think. Well, it was not a silly 'I wanna know all the words' read but a quite targeted search for words from certain specific areas: I dunno, like kitchen accessories, animals, mushrooms, etc.

I really like the word "bleed". Its so visceral. You say bleed and I get this flash of red, which is so attention grabbing, I mean, evolutionarily, we need our attention grabbed by that red - but then, underneath its base shock, its so subtle, this osmotic passage from one context to another - theres a seeping, melding fluidity. Its a brilliant word. I also like Obfuscate. Its kind of onomatopoeic. I feel like I am literally falling over it trying to get to something else. But my single word, to pass on, as cheesy as it sounds, would be love. I dont like the word love, like, physically, I find it ugly. I recognise the word love describes a multitude of things. But in all its forms, the lesson I would want to pass on is love. I find particular letters more or less attractive. I dont like v. Or K. I like C and S. Soft sides, not hard corners.

Hi! My word to you is "captivated". I'm not a native English speaker, so many words don't come to me, especially in poems and I have to translate them from Italian. So I was trying to figure out how to translate "affascinata", because the english word "fascinated" doesn't sound right to me. So I found the word "captivated". However captivated doesn't have as nice a sound as "affascinata", to me "captivated" has a harder sound, also in my mind it is associated with "capture". In the end I chose the word "seduced", which I perceive with a slight different meaning, but it can fit. But the word "captivated" keeps rolling around in my head, so I'm curious to know how you perceive this word and what it sounds like to you. 😊

I love this! I was recently taken with Corsair, found in Addison’s poem, meaning pirate! Such a beautiful word that I had never heard before ✨

Hmm... this is a fun idea for writerly sorts. What about the word "mantic" having to do with prophesy or magical foresight. "The chamber hummed with the mantic mantras of the monk." :) Have fun.

I love words that convey a ton of meaning. Words do this in general but then there are words like extrapolate. Cool sounding word to me but try and define it with 5 words or less. I recently learned 'obdurate' [stubbornly refusing to change one's opinion or course of action:] thanks to Paul Stewart. At one time or another, this word has applied to all of us especially if the situation is reasonable enough for us to consider changing our opinions and actions. And I did choose one of your prompts. Number 5. Is there a word that you both love AND hate? Yes!, Plenty. But I chose pacify. Cool word but for some reason my brain likes to correlate it with a baby's pacifier. It's an annoying distraction when you are reading and that word comes up that reminds me of an object, lol. I really wanted to do #2 but for the life of me the only word I could think of was "Breathe" 😅 I may be back to do that one if I can think of the right word. That's a really tough one! Thank you for sharing this. 💖

I love the word gravitas. It sounds so sophisticated and exotic, its root word is Latin. It’s rare for a word to sound like its meaning.

The word I've had in my head all week is coquettish. (I did have to google the spelling!) I can't recall if I read it recently or it was in a show I watched, but it's just kinda stuck :)

Callypygian: having very shapely buttocks. You're welcome. 🍑

My favorite is "evanesce" inasmuch as that is what the vast majority of us do, simply living our lives the best we can, not worrying too much about how long we will be remembered, only that we have done our best even as we watch ourselves evanesce, fading from all memory.