I’m a man who loves vagina. But I also love the WORD “vagina”. Not because it’s beautiful, but because it’s so horribly ugly. It’s cumbersome and unbalanced. And best of all, it completely takes all the fun out of the organ that is the vagina. It turns it into a medical thing, not a sensitive [...]
Words I Love
Nouns —
Category Archives: Nouns
Coterie
The French know how to party, or possibly how to enslave people. If you ever wanted solid evidence look at the following words, all from French or Old French:
escort
entourage
attendants
retinue
cortege
A coterie is a “group of people who associates with one frequently”, and is my favorite, although “cortege” nearly meets it for Most Pompous Word Ever. All [...]
Chyme
“Chyme” is cool in two directions. First is its spelling and pronunciation. “Chyme” is pronounced like “kime”. The hard “K” sound of “ch” is fucking cool. To pronounce that “ch” like “K” makes it sound serious. This is a word not to be fucked with. Same goes for “cholera” and “chable char”. The hard “ch” [...]
Bass (The Sound and the Fish)
By a simple shift in pronunciation, from the AH to the AY, you get a wild shift in meaning. “Bass” the sound (or the instrument) sounds like what it is; and “bass” the fish is such a simple-sounding word, how could it be anything but a fish? And because the meanings are so different, it’s [...]
Sinecure
“Sinecure” comes from the Latin phrase beneficium sine cura which is an archaic designation for a person holding a title within a church, and paid under that title, but without any actual duties. In some governments, sinecures are intentionally filled as patronage or to allow a designate to hold multiple offices while only fulfilling the [...]
Coitus
The definition of “coitus” given at answers.com goes as follows:
Sexual union between a male and a female involving insertion of the penis into the vagina.
No other word in English so blithely ruins the passion and intensity of sex like “coitus”. Even “copulation” has an almost playful rhythm to it, not unlike the pounding and bouncing [...]
Assassination
This one is easy. I love “assassination” because it has two asses. I learned this from a kid named Amir in the sixth grade, and I cannot write this word without remembering that wonderful moment when I realized I was writing “ass” on my spelling test.
An interesting fact about this word, it actually comes originally [...]
Tintinnabulation
Tintinnabulation is the ringing our sounding of bells. There is, of course, no reason you would ever actually say “tintinnabulation” when it takes three times as long as just saying “ringing”. Why this word is still around is a mystery, but it has a simple and direct etymology from Latin, so it may simply be [...]
Sophistry
This is a word that I love, but never get to use. There is simply never a good time for it. Random House defines it as
a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning.
The American Heritage Dictionary calls it
Plausible but fallacious argumentation.
We encounter sophistry every day — from the media, our friends, our [...]
Pandemonium
Pandemonium is not chaos. Chaos might be understood, even accepted, but pandemonium will not let you rest, and leaves you confused and shellshocked. Pandemonium is chaos with a greater element of danger and fear. It is a total lack of order, decorum, and ethics. While chaos can describe the seemingly random actions of a set [...]