mosker

Wordy

Your Vocabulary Score: A-

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

Do they really not hear it?

Fine, I admit it. This is a peeve: Young women who seek to be professionals in their fields, but who do not understand that their poor language skills threaten their success. This is no less egregious in men, but women still have to work harder to prove their worth and should not sabotage their chances.

Here's a tip: if you have a Ph.D., if you are within spitting distance of earning a Ph.D., or if you even know what that means, you may not axe anyone anything, ever. No matter how earth-shattering the content of your conversation, every "axe" is a bright red stop sign in the minds of your listeners. They will not hear the details of your breakthrough because they are too busy recovering from the shock of having been axed.

And an aside to my friends: Please tell me if you ever hear me habitually mispronounce or misuse a word or phrase.

for the record

Voltaire (the French philosopher) is pronounced (vl-târ, vl-, vôl-tr), NOT vol-i-taar

An apostrophe should not be used to indicate a plural.

Ufology

from Dictionary.com:

u·fol·o·gy
n.

The study of unidentified flying objects.

This afternoon's episode of Midsomer Murders on the Bio Channel featured a character who considered himself a ufologist. Of course I had to look it up.

I think it was the "Soda" that did it

Your Linguistic Profile:

75% General American English

10% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Yankee

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Panglossian

New, from Dictionary.com's Word of the Day service:

Word of the Day for Friday April 8, 2005

   Panglossian \pan-GLOSS-ee-uhn\, adjective:
   Excessively or naively optimistic.

It just seems so appropriate.

It looked like it was a beautiful day today, but I did not go outside. One of my classes ends in 11 days--one 5 page paper and a 12 page book review are still outstanding. Since even working in the yard is more appealing than more homework, I didn't want to risk the distraction. Instead I spent the day reading about research on the deterrent value of arrest in domestic violence cases.

Although I am usually panicking around this time of the semester, this year I am attempting to remain panglossian.

pestiferous

I love words. As much as I enjoy learning new words, though, it can be disappointing to find a great word that I know I'll never have the opportunity to use because no one would know what I mean. Let's face it, a large vocabulary is wonderful, but if your readers or listeners don't have a clue what you're talking about, you are not really communicating.

Having said that, I really like this word that I learned last week from Dictionary.com's Word of the Day service:

Word of the Day for Friday March 25, 2005

   pestiferous \pes-TIF-uh-ruhs\, adjective:
   1. Bearing or bringing disease.
   2. Infected with or contaminated by a pestilential disease.
   3. Morally evil or dangerous to society; pernicious.
   4. Bothersome; troublesome; annoying.

There must be some way to integrate this word into our vocabularies? For example: "Research assignments are pestiferous." [definition #4] or "Opponents of Blue Valley's reading list object to the pestiferous nature of the required books." [definition #3]