To continue off-topicry but reduce its degree: mentioning ‘badinage’ (pronounce to rhyme with ‘Raj’) reminds me of a strange phenomenon that’s emerged in the last few years in the UK - pronouncing ‘homage’ as a French word, dropped aitch, 2nd-syllable stress and all. What’s going there then? It sounds grotesquely pretentious as well as unaccountably wrong to me, but seems to be a new standard in the media – notably in BBC arts magazine programmes, which could really do without such gratuitous additional irritants. Is the context in which this has been happening (artistic tribute) actually supposed to feature a distinct concept which has its own word?

I quite like ‘badinage’ but don’t consider it obscure. I do remember being initially baffled and then permanently disillusioned when I used the word ‘narcissistic’ at an Oxford college JCR meeting, only to be met with mocking whoops as though it must be an attempt to show off.

(Bloix @82 – I think this must be due to using a dash without a space after it. It looks as though two dashes have been eliminated from the post, and I’ve noticed that the server-side shenanigans treats some characters as tags. It’s pretty well-known that a start-of-line asterisk with a space after it turns into a bullet, and many have suffered from tags (e.g. italics, block-quote) being automatically closed when two newlines occur in succession. But also, for example, flanking things with asterisks turns them bold, ‘^’ on each side raises the text, and I[‘ve come across a few others I can’t remember. I hadn’t worked this out before, but it looks like the tag/not tag distinction probably rests on the lack of a space.

Test: if this is struck out – and this isn’t – then the hypothesis is proved, to my satisfaction anyway.)

I doubt it. I have never heard “abscissa” used in a military context, to describe ground or in any other sense. The term used would be “horizon”. And “quadrant” in a military context is an optical device used to check that an artillery piece is level; the military term appropriate for use here would be “arc” or “sector”.

I am open to correction. If soldiers in the US military are habitually taught to call the horizon the abscissa, then Bloix is correct.

McCarthy’s not even using them correctly in a mathematical context, I’d say – if an abscissa is a specific x-coordinate, then it’s a vertical line, not a horizontal line. Maybe the mathematically adept Llewellyn Moss is supposed to be lying down on his side.

I’m trying to work out whether I knew this already or not. I think the English sense must be drifting that way.

Neal Stephenson has a problem with his digraphs; as well as “oestival” for “aestival”, he had “foeces” for “faeces” in some book.

And “totipotent” is not a musty Victorian word; it’s central to the stem cell wars.

And my nominated word is “gnomic”.

Roughly, “to speak evasively”, or “to refuse a clear answer”. “Waffling” in the English sense may be used to evade a question, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient.

But seriously, the use of a hard word that he gives from Cormac McCarthy shows that he didn’t quite understand what McCarthy was up to:

“It took me a while before I worked out what Cormac McCarthy meant when he described the American desert thus in No Country For Old Men: “The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant.” Abscissa is, I now know, a mathematical term for the distance to a point along the x-axis of a graph. The desert plain is the remorselessly straight horizontal reference for everything – mountains, men, clouds – that strives to rise above it.”

But the thing is, in this passage we are seeing the world through the eyes of the hero, the working class Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss. Moss is no mathematician, but he would have known and used “abscissa” and “quadrant” to himself as a result of his military training, as words used to describe terrain in a precisely mathematical way. This isn’t the author’s disinterested description of the desert that we’re reading. Moss is viewing the landscape as if it were a battlefield.

McCarthy doesn’t care if we have to look words up – he wants us to have to, because he wants us to feel that his characters are more competent than we are. Here he uses a hard word to make it clear that Moss is perfectly at home as a hunter in the desert, in the way that we, the readers, are not. And he is also foreshadowing the carnage that Moss is soon to witness.