What new word did you learn today?

This is intriguing. I never realized the words are from the same root, and at first I couldn't see what relation they bear, but then it came to me—to measure the diameter of a circle you scribe a line straight through the center. If that circle is a pie chart or graph of some kind, with opposites on opposite sides, then it's a perfect representation of two things that are diametrically opposed.

 

Prevaricate
intransitive verb. : to deviate from the truth : equivocate.

Also, equivocate is new
"use ambiguous language so as to conceal the truth or avoid committing oneself."

 

I assume though that you've come across unequivocal being used?

 

You know, now that you mention it, unequivocally rings a rather large bell.

 

Bombulating.

Not a new word, but a fine one and one that deserves more use. It means to buzz or to hum, and I learned it from Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales:

"And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring
out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier
in Pompeii. "

 

Phatic — of or relating to language used for general purposes of social interaction, rather than to convey information or ask questions.

Not that I would actually use this one in a story—nobody would know what the hell it means.

 

Courgettes

Apparently what we Amurricans call zucchini.

Thanks to member Hammer, in another thread.

 

What's worse, half the readers would think they know what it means -- and they'd be wrong.
(Phallic)

 

Well, that explains that before I could look it up. Hercule Poirot called them vegetable marrows.

 

Same here, and I believe this is the first one I had actually learned on the day I posted it here.

 

garum: a spicy sauce made with fish entrails and fermented in direct sunlight.

 

Happens to be a favorite word of mine, so much so that I named a character after it.

 

That definition implies that the word is a verb, not a noun.

 

Never tried it. But I hear the Romans liked it a lot.

 

Mamihlapinatapai. A Yaghan word meaning roughly "looking at each other hoping that the other will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do."

 

Peregrination
noun

a journey, especially a long or meandering one. "she kept Aunt Ilsa company on her peregrinations"

 

Then I guess a Peregrine Falcon must be a long-traveling falcon?

 

Sounds like a first kiss.

 

But "To [anything]" is a verb form, not a noun.

-- signed Pedants-R-Us

 

Inosculation ~ to unite intimately.
Not so much what the birds and bees do… but what the trees do. I’ve a buckthorn tree at bottom of my garden, close inspection tells me its wider trunk’s made of many smaller ones. Must have been a bunch of seeds (I speculated) grown into a cluster of saplings, then at the points where each of the stems make contact with each other does the bark become abraded. In time the white wood’s exposed and the healing process has the individual saplings fuse, two, three four, five become one.

 

Incunable
noun

an early printed book, especially one printed before 1501.