But even better is “defenestration’s” origin. First, this uncommon noun refers to the act of throwing someone or something out of a window, and that sort of specificity is just the thing to delight word lovers. Defenestration - While not a word that you’re likely to use often, “defenestration” is nonetheless dazzling. Enjoy these seven words you should find every opportunity to use, and maybe you, too, will fall in love with this vibrant, wild whore of a language.ġ.
WEIRD WORD OF THE DAY HOW TO
There are, in fact, people who write dictionaries-people whose job is, as Noah Webster put it, “to collect, define, and arrange, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language.” Those people devote themselves to weighing the grist of the language every day: working out exactly how to describe the difference between “measly” and “teeny,” agonizing over what part of speech the “how” in “How come?” is, spending late nights at the office hammering out definitions for the word “take.” These folks are called “lexicographers,” and in the course of their work elbows-deep in the roiling muck of English, they discover that this flexible, inventive language has some delights squirrelled away into its darker and less-frequented corners. If few people give much thought to dictionaries themselves, then they give almost no thought to how those dictionaries came to be, or who created them.
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