Words, Terms, and Phrases (Vocabulary)

Rick and Morty: I throw footballs good.

Just words and phrases I’ve encountered here and there, that neatly encapsulate something. Roughly akin to a personalized “word of the day” collection, except, they’re all in one place.

• Tsundoku: The Art of Buying Books and Never Reading Them.
• Kintsugi: The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum ... As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
• Enchiridion: book containing essential information on a subject (discovered here).
• Otaku.
  
• Turbidity - the clarity of water, a measure of the degree to which the water loses its transparency due to the presence of suspended particulates, the measure of relative clarity of a liquid. 9/17/2020.
• metonym - a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated. For example, Washington is a metonym for the federal government of the US. 10/2/2020.
• maundering - talk in a rambling manner.
• lugubrious - looking or sounding sad and dismal.
• defenestration - the action of throwing someone out of a window.
• hagiography - biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, and by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religion
• deuteragonist - the person second in importance to the protagonist in a drama (Mr. Miyagi to Daniel-san).
• Annus horribilis - a Latin phrase, meaning “horrible year.” It is complementary to annus mirabilis, which means “wonderful year.” Plural: anni horribiles.
  
• Doyen - Last night’s interview, facilitated by that doyen of the new elites, Oprah (the senior ambassador by length of service; any senior member of a group)
• Caliginous - misty, dim; obscure, dark.
• Triskaidekaphobia - fear or avoidance of the number 13.
• “The universe is hostile. So Impersonal. Devour to survive. So it is. So it’s always been.” Vicarious.
• “Kein Operationsplan reicht mit einiger Sicherheit über das erste Zusammentreffen mit der feindlichen Hauptmacht hinaus.” (No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.) Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke
• logorrhea - noun - excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness.
• Erfurter Latrinensturz - the Erfurt latrine disaster (I have to find a way to use this at some point...)
• Herostratic fame - where a person earns fame through misdeeds; references the man who burned Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, because he wanted to be famous.
• Ipse dixit - Latin, “he said it himself” - an assertion without proof, or a dogmatic expression of opinion.
  
• “When your enemy is executing a false movement, never interrupt him.” Napoleon Bonaparte (morphed over the years to some variant of: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.”)
• Badinage - humorous or witty conversation. (With thanks to JMS and Talia Winters.)
• distaff - of or concerning women. Romancing the Stone has been described as a “distaff Raiders [of the Lost Ark] rip-off.”
• crepuscular - of, resembling, or relating to twilight; Zoology (of an animal) appearing or active in twilight. Dogs are, apparently, crepuscular by nature.
• arriviste - an ambitious or ruthlessly self-seeking person, especially one who has recently acquired wealth or social status.
  
• dogsbody - a person who is given boring, menial tasks to do. “I got myself a job as typist and general dogsbody on a small magazine.”
• sesquipedalian - (of a word) polysyllabic; long: sesquipedalian surnames
  ... characterized by long words; long-winded: the sesquipedalian prose of scientific journals.
• complaisant - not complacent. :) willing to please others; obliging; agreeable: when unharnessed, Northern dogs are peaceful and complaisant.
• carmine - a vivid crimson color.
• onomatopoeia - the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named (e.g. cuckoo, sizzle)
• neurasthenia - a mostly (?) abandoned psychiatric diagnosis, an ill-defined medical condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache, and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance. In Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Author was “suffering from a mild case of ‘Scribe’s Fever’ (a form of neurasthenia common among the intelligentsia of that time).”
• synecdoche - a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning “Cleveland's baseball team”).
• Baader-Meinhof – the phenomenon where one stumbles upon some obscure piece of information⁠—often an unfamiliar word or name⁠—and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly.
• Befehl ist Befehl.
• out ahead of his/her skis - also over his/her skis etc - an idiom, to do something too early, or before you are ready or prepared.
• Monroney sticker - never knew this had a name, but of course it does - the window sticker required to be displayed in all new automobiles.
• pied-à-terre: A small apartment, house, or room kept for occasional use. Just the thing to say you’re shopping for if you want to check out $10M+ apartments in New York.
• Zeno’s paradox(es). (I need to dig into these more.)
• vranyo (Russian) - “You know I'm lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.”
• Zeitenwende: a profound turning point in history.
• samizdat: the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state, especially formerly in the communist countries of eastern Europe.
• De Gustibus non Disputandum Est (often shortened to De Gustibus): Of taste, there is no disputing; i.e., personal preferences are not debatable.

More to come (obviously).