Cappuccino Word-a-Palooza: 5 Words You Need to Know

With handy examples!

“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.”
― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

I’m not old enough to remember when verbal precision became an anachronism, but I would hazard to say it happened sometime during the 1960s. Most of what I’ve read that was written in the decade before that period—Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, A Good Man is Hard to Find & Other Stories by one of my all-time favorite short story writers, Flannery O’Connor—contained ideas that were clearly and beautifully articulated. Granted, there were (and are) books written since where the authors use language in creative and breathtaking ways, but they are becoming fewer. In my business, beautiful writing has taken a backseat to plot, a preference for “marginalized voices,” and a raft of other particulars of modern storytelling that simply don’t prioritize how the story is told so long as it’s told efficiently.

Cormac McCarthy is a notable exception:

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The Road is a massively depressing book. It is so bleak, in fact, that I would first make sure I was prepared to suffer the psychological consequences of reading it. Yet from the unrelenting misery of its characters, as is sometimes the case in real life, too, a rose blooms. But if you don’t understand Cormac’s use of the word “vermiculate” (a variation of it is one of our vocabulary words for the day), you miss out on the power of his description. This is one of a hundred reasons why having a wide-ranging vocabulary is important and useful—you know, in addition to wooing women.

At some point, we stopped using language inventively, with the notable exception of Black Vernacular English, which is stylistic and linguistically rich and free-flowing. That’s where our language is being pushed forward, and for proof, look no farther than hip-hop lyrics. For most Americans, however, it’s all emojis and abbreviations, too many words that are half as effective, words that fail to convey the meaning of the speaker.

In one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite television series, Fargo, Season 2, defense attorney Karl Weathers (played by Nick Offerman), a man of drunken grandiloquence, displays the kind of linguistic legerdemain you might expect from King Lear. It’s well worth a watch.

“Out of my way, tool of the state!”

All this to say that perhaps the time has come for us to dispense with sloppy communication and start cultivating some actual vocabulary skills. With that in mind, I thought we could start with these five words. You might have to write them down or put them somewhere you frequently go (the refrigerator, say, tacked to the door with a magnet), but once you’ve remembered them all, you can congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Vermicular: (adjective) [Pron. ver-mik-yuh-ler] 1 a : resembling a worm in form or motion. b : vermiculate. 2 : of, relating to, or caused by worms.

What a happy little word this is, so Latinate and yet so tidy. It hearkens from Medieval Latin vermiculāris and means “insect larva, grub.”

How to use it in a sentence: It was difficult to follow Hal’s vermicular logic to its conclusion, which was that I, by some strange and wondrous alchemy, owed him money.

Refluent: (adjective) [Pron. ref-loo-uhnt, ruh-floo-] 1: flowing back; ebbing, as the waters of a tide.

This poetical word comes from the Latin verb refluere, meaning "to flow back." Its cousin, confluent, means “to flow together.”

How to use it in a sentence: In subsequent visits to that ruined house, all her sadness was refluent, since the sooty chintz curtains and sagging front porch reminded her of everything she’d lost.

mansuetude: (noun) [Pron. man-swi-tood] 1: mildness; gentleness.

Here is a word that owes its poetry to the Latin mānsuētūdō, which is equivalent to manus, or “hand”. It’s been combined with another Latin word, suēscere.

How to use it in a sentence: Here then was a proud, disagreeable man with the bearing of a ship’s captain who, when he spoke to his toy poodle, displayed all the charming mansuetude of a doting father.

cenotaph: (noun) [Pron. sen-uh-taf, -tahf ] 1: a monument to someone buried elsewhere, especially one commemorating people who died in a war.

From the Latin word cenotaphium, or “empty tomb.”

When they dug up his bones and discovered none, it was soon realized that his touching and majestic headstone was little more than a cenotaph.

Solipsism: (noun) [Pron. sol-ip-siz-uhm] 1: Philosophy. the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist; 2: extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption.

Oh, if ever there was a more fitting word for our times! This one owes its authority to the Latin words for alone (sol) and self (ipse), and means that only the self is real. You also get solipsistic and solipsist out of it, so double points.

How to use it in a sentence: You say Donald J. Trump is a narcissist; I say he suffers from incurable solipsism.

Enjoy your fun new vocabulary words! If you have any to contribute, send ‘em along!

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin

Do you have some fancy “five-dollar words” you care to share? I love learning new ones. Leave your comments in the comments section below.