Like you, I love words (I'm a writer, after all), but in my writing I've tried to err more on the side of Hemingway's simplicity. I don't want to stump my reader...though once in a great while I'll throw in a $10 word just for giggles.
Maladroit is awesome and it's such a nice, fancy little way of insulting someone just a wee bit! Also, I'm not sure this counts, but I love the word "Preakness" of the Preakness Stakes. Love it!
Thanks for the new words! Needless to say, being a voice actor and audiobook narrator, I look up the correct pronunciation of words constantly. I enjoy it except when a simple word gets complicated. Take sixths, it looks so innocent and easy to say. According to more than one YouTube site on English pronunciation, its one of the hardest. I can attest, as I'm not sure I ever made a client happy who used it several times in a math script.
"If you divide Chinese into its sub-variants" -- there are solid, empirical reasons for doing this. Mandarin is as far or further from Cantonese than English is from Swedish.
When you break English out between the lexical vs. non-lexical ("grammatical") terms, about 60% or more comes from French (effin' Normans.) Non-lexical terms are more deeply rooted in the language, and as such are much less subject to natural evolution. So words like "the" (der/die/das) or "is" ("ist") remain much closer to their roots in Old High German.
By the bye, the common phrase "that's the ticket" came about because the English misheard the French when they said "that's etiquette."
The mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has often been accused of inventing words, yet there is no evidence that he ever did so. Rather, revived old English terms that had fallen out of usage ("prehension," "concretion", for example) and then repurposed them to his philosophical arguments.
Like you, I love words (I'm a writer, after all), but in my writing I've tried to err more on the side of Hemingway's simplicity. I don't want to stump my reader...though once in a great while I'll throw in a $10 word just for giggles.
Maladroit is awesome and it's such a nice, fancy little way of insulting someone just a wee bit! Also, I'm not sure this counts, but I love the word "Preakness" of the Preakness Stakes. Love it!
Thanks for the new words! Needless to say, being a voice actor and audiobook narrator, I look up the correct pronunciation of words constantly. I enjoy it except when a simple word gets complicated. Take sixths, it looks so innocent and easy to say. According to more than one YouTube site on English pronunciation, its one of the hardest. I can attest, as I'm not sure I ever made a client happy who used it several times in a math script.
"If you divide Chinese into its sub-variants" -- there are solid, empirical reasons for doing this. Mandarin is as far or further from Cantonese than English is from Swedish.
When you break English out between the lexical vs. non-lexical ("grammatical") terms, about 60% or more comes from French (effin' Normans.) Non-lexical terms are more deeply rooted in the language, and as such are much less subject to natural evolution. So words like "the" (der/die/das) or "is" ("ist") remain much closer to their roots in Old High German.
By the bye, the common phrase "that's the ticket" came about because the English misheard the French when they said "that's etiquette."
The mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has often been accused of inventing words, yet there is no evidence that he ever did so. Rather, revived old English terms that had fallen out of usage ("prehension," "concretion", for example) and then repurposed them to his philosophical arguments.