“Garret” is not the prettiest word that ever caught my eyes. There are words that sound similar which are more mellifluous, such as gannet (a beautiful oceangoing bird), and garotte (a lovely word for a method of execution by strangulation; you may have also heard the term “garrote wire”). In the fine words of Dictionary.com: [...]
Words I Love
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Category Archives: Specificity
Aquiline
Sometimes a word comes along that’s so specific, you have to wonder what the inventors of the word were doing that they even needed it. First, the meaning of aquiline is as follows: of, relating to, or having characteristics of an eagle Lovely. But it isn’t used so often for this as it is used [...]
Hypocorism
I love this definition of hypocorism from Wikipedia (no reference given): hypocorisms frequently demonstrate (indirectly) a phonological linguistic universal (or tendency) for high-pitched sounds to be used for smaller creatures and objects (here as more “cute” or less imposing names) To the rest of us this means our tendency to take a word, or name, and [...]
Shallow Epicontinental Seas
The phrase “shallow epicontinental seas” only comes up when talking about one specific subject: the Cretaceous period, and the many swimming dinosaurs that inhabited them, such as mosasaurs. Imagine a 50-foot-long crocodile with giant flippers that glides like a whale and eats anything. It would even eat your hairy nutsack after you’ve been wrestling. Even [...]
