High-Vocabulary Word of the Day

Endeavoring to contribute to your perspicacious lexicon.

  • Follow Daily

    You can follow High-Vocab WotD here, on Twitter

    You can follow High-Vocab WotD here, on Twitter

    And you can follow High-Vocab WotD, via our Facebook Page, here.

    And you can follow High-Vocab WotD, via our Facebook Page, here.

Posts Tagged ‘verbiage’

Logolepsy

Posted by kazvorpal on July 28, 2010


Logolepsy

n. A severe fascination or obsession with words

Pretty straighforward

Examples:

Thanks to the magic of teleconferencing, often the format for a given show is call-in, and the phones and airwaves crackle with logolepsy.
— Richard Lederer, A Man of My Words (2003)

A case of logolepsy is easily distinguished from the perfectly sane mood which demands and imperiosly seizes the pregnant sign, and makes it the exponent of a hidden power.
— Maurice Thompson, My winter garden: a nature-lover under southern skies (1900)

Etymology:

Logos is Greek for “word”, -lepsy is Greek, “to seize”


Advertisement

Posted in Grammar / Syntax, Knowledge | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Fillip

Posted by kazvorpal on July 23, 2010


Fillip

v. To flick one’s finger (or the act of doing so), by bracing it against and snapping it away from the thumb, often euphemism or simile for encouragement

This may be a dismissive gesture, be used to indicate a direction, or to discard probuscine effluvium

Examples:

If I do, fillip me with a three-man beetle.
— Falstaff, Henry IV part 2, by William Shakespeare (1599)

Eat, drink, and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.
Lord Byron, Sardanapalus (1821)

Faithful horoscope-watching, practiced daily, provides just the sort of small but warm and infinitely reassuring fillip that gets matters off to a spirited start.
— Shana Alexander, “A delicious appeal to unreason” (2005)

Etymology: Appearing in the 15th century, it seems simply to remind one of the sound that the gesture would make

Posted in Knowledge, poetry | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

 
%d bloggers like this: