Bodacious cowboys / Such as your friend / Will never be welcome here / High in the Custerdome

termagant

Also, this page is quite fun: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/unuwords.htm

One of Keith Jarrett’s better known songs.

They put on a great show in Omaha last month said a friend of mine who went with his 67-year-old father. And Fagen gave some curmudgeonly responses in a recent Rolling Stone piece that I thought were pretty funny. Said they don’t play “Reelin” or “Rikki” no more and I don’t believe they played either of those tunes here at the recent show. I still like to hear “Deacon Blues” and “Rikki” now and again along with a couple of others. “Custerdome” is certainly multi-allusive. Cool word.

One word per week? That seems a bit underachieving.

According to (one) arbiter of such things (Wikipedia) “From age 6 to 8, the average child in school is learning 6–7 words per day, and from age 8 to 12, approximately 12 words per day.”

Does lexical acquisition really stop on the 12th birthday? Or is the exercise in fact about selecting which of the ~72 words learnt over the past week is most likely to please the teacher? Still, learning that bit seems like useful information for later in life.

Wow. Isn’t Steely Dan something most parents would want to keep a twelve year old girl about a million miles from? I mean, Jesus, half the songs are about perverted sex with someone a fraction of the narrator’s age. But if you two are good with it more power to both of you.

I totally love Steely Dan, despite the fact that I don’t have much time for pretty much every thing else about yacht rock, jazz fusion, and LA alienation (other than this, of course).

“Martinet” is a good word for twelve-year-olds.

And of course, from Steve Miller’s (of Madison, WI) The Joker:

“Some people call me Maurice / ’cause I speak of the pompatus of love”

There actually was a movie eponymously titled with the last four words and about what the hell “pompatus” means. I haven’t watched it and can’t say if Wittgenstein was ever mentioned.

Words whose definitions I can never remember, no matter how many times I look them up:

Amanuensis
Defalcation
Epistimological
Hagiography
Heuristic
Quotidian

@10 Carminative is great! I only ever encountered it in a Huxley novel (Crome Yellow?) where the point was that it means something grossly different from what you might intuit.

More generally, are we looking for adult ‘big words’ like “martinet” and “termagant”, or for genuinely obscure ones, like “carminative”? In the latter category, I’ve always liked “epigones”, from Trotsky and “transpontine”, given to me by a friend, decades ago.

“Occident(al)” seems a good word to me, as in “what’s the opposite of ‘Orient(al)'”.

Also: “masticate.” This is the kind of word Child #1 used to use on much younger Child#2, e.g. “Stop masticating with your mouth open.” Child #2 developed a strong vocab as a result of such sibling hijinks.

@Heliopause —

I think it’d actually be fairer to say that a lot of Steely Dan songs are about how pathetic it is to be having sex with someone only a fraction of your age.

Wrt one such song, whenever she heard the line “the fine Colombian”, my ex-girlfriend would shake her hips a la Shakira.

Syzygy.

All those Ys! And a Zs! Plus it looks made up, like something from a bad science fiction story (“It’s worse than that! We’ve become stuck in the syzygy!”) only it’s a real and useful word in astronomy.

Just go through your average Jack Vance novel – I think all those words will be used conversationally. Also I believe Steely Dan would make a decent soundtrack to said novel.

Another great one, although the plural is tricky: Hapax legomenon. She could almost deliver a lecture to her class on that one.

Here’s a good source of ideas:
http://wordsmith.org/awad/archives.html

Custerdome!

One cavalry regiment enters, no cavalry regiment leaves!
One cavalry regiment enters, no cavalry regiment leaves!

‘eleemosynary’.

but it’s not always the big ones: ‘crass’ is very effective.

‘unbirthday’ has use too.

Note to self: using the word ‘inc*st’ in a comment gets it put into moderation.

Tuvalu has a state church and English as a national language. I don’t know if it has much of disestablishmentarian movement to be opposed, though.

Cosmodemonic, from Henry Miller. (A dig at the Western Union of 100 years ago that fits Google just as well today.)

Usufructuary. Sounds kinky but is actually boring.

Take any volume from The Book of the New Sun, open to a random page, and take the first work you notice, and give it to your daughter.

A similar trick with Stephen Donaldson books is, of course, the foundation of the great sport of Clench Racing.
http://news.ansible.co.uk/plotdev.html
“This is a social and competitive sport, that can be played over and over with renewed pleasure. Playing equipment currently on the market restricts the number of players to six, but the manufacturers may yet issue the series of proposed supplements to raise the maximum eventually to nine.
“The rules are simple. Each player takes a different volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and at the word “go” all open their books at random and start leafing through, scanning the pages. The winner is the first player to find the word “clench”. It’s a fast, exciting game – sixty seconds is unusually drawn-out – and can be varied, if players get too good, with other favourite Donaldson words like wince, flinch, gag, rasp, exigency, mendacity, articulate, macerate, mien, limn, vertigo, cynosure….”

slantendicular

Word: dote.

Song: While not SD proper, Fagen’s cover of “Ruby Baby.”

You do have a corpy of the weak about the haus, i hopenprey. All the sorts of verbals for shoujo’s delectation there.

Wait, I think The Royal Scam has nine tracks. Told you it’s been a while …

Words: popinjay, cockalorum (anyone dealing with a bureaucrat with a stamp has encountered this one)

SD: No other song invokes the Seventies for me as much as “FM”.

Phocine

Read it in “Lolita” when I was in college. Looked it up in the dictionary but, like so many of the words in that novel, it wasn’t in there. This was in the days of internet 1.0, which I didn’t have in my apartment. Reading that book now, with the power of a gazillion dictionaries at my fingertips, would be a totally different experience.

@30 Mieville is great for rarely used words, used correctly and poetically. But you must be careful – he makes words up too, particularly in some of his more fantastical worlds. Though even when he makes up words, the Latin and Greek roots are correct.

burnoose
comodogenic
desuetude
replevin (she could get lost in archaic legal terms)
ruching (as I got lost in S.J. Perelman)
spackle
stipple
withers (n. not v.)
wattles (I once saw a fat man described as a “wattle baron”)

I dervied much pleasure when a teenager from discovering Ogden Nash’s poem on the word velleity.

I loved how Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun took genuine (but obscure/archaic) English words and repurposed them to new meanings.

Steven Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant on the other hand, is just irritating in the way he fixates on some words that are normally rare in English.

And “rugose” is a real word, though its use by H.P. Lovecraft might lead you to suspect otherwise. (“The Great Race’s members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes”)

Reading SF/Fantasy may be a “bad influence” on your vocabulary :-)

Thrapple
Suzerain
Languid

Nugatory

Messuage – a relatively old English legal term meaning, roughly, a package of property.

And here’s the fun bit! It derives not from some obscure latin root but from an ancient typo. It was simply a mistake made by someone transcribing the French word ‘menage’. It was then copied and recopied until it eventually entered the legal lexicon.

Ooh, lexicon. That’s a good one. Apt, too.

perspicuous
perspicacious

Getting away from the longer Latinate words for a second, there’s always “knap” and “cwm”. (Tho the English “knap” doesn’t come close to matching the awesomeness of the German “knapp”.)

I also find that “cattycorner” (or “catercorner”) is an amazingly useful word that people don’t use nearly often enough.

Skry.
I too encountered carminative in Chrome Yellow. Didn’t know anyone else still alive had read that.

“Words whose definitions I can never remember, no matter how many times I look them up…” (jazzbumpa @22)

That reminded me of something I’d read in the early to mid-1980s by a famous author who marked his dictionary every time he looked up a word and he’d had to look up a lot of the same ones numerous times (me, too!). Thought it was John Irving or John Updike and turns out it was John Irving: “Beside every word I look up in my dictionary, I make a mark. Beside every word I look up more than once, I write a note to myself…I have looked up ‘strictly’ 14 times since 1964.”

http://academic.cuesta.edu/acasupp/as/801.htm

Cromulent!

(Ooh, widdershins, good one Bloix!)

@bad Jim: That’s exactly the story Huxley uses for “Carminative”, but for a character who is definitely not Bertrand Russell (tho I think the novel I recall is a roman a clef)

Hah! That, perversely, makes me feel better about my memory lapses. I’m not that much worse now, perhaps. Come to think of it, I’ve certainly read more Huxley than Russell.

‘Ubiquitous’ and ‘teleology’ are two words Steinbeck emphasized in “The Log of the Sea of Cortez”, which I read at about that age (unless memory fails me again) Worse, I have a vivid memory of an even more obscure word from marine biology, having been out on a boat that brought up a pregnant shark which was cut open for our education: ovoviviparous, not the easiest thing to drop into casual conversation.

Just one more, I promise. My mother, her father, my sister and my brothers have rather prominent noses. Embarrassingly big honkers. My mother once confided that she wished she had an “aquiline” nose, meaning, I think, something modest like mine or my father’s. An aquiline nose, of course, is an eagle’s beak, crooked and protrusive, very like her own conspicuous proboscis.

“Ask your lawyer about Replevinâ„¢ …”

I like the word “probosculate,” but as far as I can discern, it only ever appears in the Muppet Movie, spoken by Dr. Teeth of the Electric Mayhem.

Still. . . it’s a word. . .

“Ovoviviparous” reminds me of “sphygmomanometer”, both of which I know only because they were on the test.

I learned “replevin” from P.G. Wodehouse. (Laughing Gas, I think.) A lawyer was up to his eyebrows in Writs of Replevin. Wodehouse also used the phrase “socage in fief” in “Uncle Fred Flits By”. 40 years ago, during my 4 months transit in law school, I also learned about leaping — or possibly shifting — seisin. (“shifting seisin” might be my own fantasy)

And then there’s Myles (the da) who weeps and gnashes his teeth over the possibility that his property would be “ESTREATED”. [caps in original].

“…no stubble at all…”

Tautological is a useful word.

An adversary once derided an argument in a brief I’d submitted as “thixotropic.” Once I looked it up I decided it was a perfectly good metaphor.

Thixotropic brings to mind

Shake and shake the catsup bottle.
First none will come, and then a lot’ll.

Just in case there’s a chance of reviving a Dan discussion.

I suppose the place to start with a defense of Dan is with their uniqueness. If you were familiar with their style, and you heard an instrumental cover of one of their songs that you had never heard (instrumental so that Fagen’s voice is not a clue), chances are very good you would know you were hearing a Steely Dan tune. Only Becker and Fagen write like that (from the peanut gallery: or want to! which is of course has been thrown at every original stylist. BTW, I think it’s mostly Fagen, as his solo work sounds like Steely Dan. Becker’s not so much.) Of how many pop or rock artists can this be said? Even among jazz musicians, it is mostly true of the real giants – Miles, Monk – who casual jazz listeners might identify, as opposed to Jackie Maclean or Tommy Flanagan, who connoisseurs could identify and who are fine players, but not necessarily giants.

As for the dirty old man thing, half their songs is a wild exaggeration, of course, but they have hit that note more than once: Babylon Sisters, Hey Nineteen, Janey Runaway. I think it is understood, is it not, that rock starts boink 20 year olds well into middle-age, maybe beyond, for the same reason Clinton gave – because they can. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mick Jagger still has groupies today. But if Mick writes a song about a hot young thing, the unstated premise is that he is still a hot young thing himself, maybe hotter. Dan are looking at it more honestly. And they don’t shy away from how dark and exploitative such relationships can be. Here is how Janey Runaway starts:

It must have been my lucky Thursday.
Your dad went on that spree.
Before the crew put out the fire,
You caught the next bus to NYC.
Down in Tampa, the future was desperate and dark.
Now you’re the wonder waif of Grammercy Park.

Ouch.