“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 duties of one.
For the rest of us not applying for the job of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead or Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a sinecure can be any job or position in which one is paid a salary but which there is little actual responsibility.
As an amateur artist and musician myself, a sinecure represents the ultimate goal in financial sustainability. But sinecures are rarely positions one can seek with intention. It’s something one falls into by chance. For example, one might apply to an office job that turns out to have little actual responsibility, and one can then repurpose his time to work on his own projects while drawing a salary for his stated meaningless title.
“Raw” is the rawest word I know. “Raw” is intense. For a word with no hard sounds, it still sounds hardcore.
Its origins are no less astonishing, with connections to Latin, Greek, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European, Old Norse, Old Irish, Sanskrit, and Slavic. The need to describe bloody, exposed and uncooked flesh goes back to the dawn of languages and possibly the dawn of civilization. With the invention of fire came the invention of cooked meat, and therefore a need to describe the uncooked variety.
Saying “raw” with a low, guttural “AUGH” makes me feel connected to my caveman roots. It makes me want to fuck somebody in this primeval way; to fuck somebody raw.
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 of intercourse. Coitus also ruins sex by taking away all the sexual activities that take place outside intercourse. It is specifically designated to only describe a penetrative interface between a penis and a vagina — so no oral, no manual, no anal play. Just plain old dick in the twat.
If one goes back several centuries, one would find that “coitus” originally meant any union or coming together, and more specifically forces that brought planetary bodies into union.
There are some interesting modifiers that allow one to participate in alternative forms of coitus, including coitus a tergo, where the penis enters the vagina from behind; femoral coitus, which takes place between the thighs; and axillary coitus, which is sex with an armpit.
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 from Arabic, and shares a common heritage with “hashish”. The “hashishiyyin” were a group of Arabs known for eating hashish and murdering opponents. The word was later anglicized after spending some time in the French and Italian laundry.
Also, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the online etymology dictionary is full of shit on this one.
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 the offspring of pompous 18th-century closeted assholes.
There is also an adjectival form — “tintinnabular” — which would probably be more useful. For example, one might say any of the following phrases:
“The tintinnabular engineer is coming this afternoon to fix the buzzing coming from C-sharp.”
“These are no ordinary bats, they are tintinnabular bats.”
“Dude! That shit is tintinnabular!”
This is a word I love because it is fun to say, sounds a little like what it means but its meaning is useless in modern society, and you would never ever say it, except in the sentence:
“I love the word ‘tintinnabulation.’”
A shit-ton is an extremely large quantity of something. It has not yet been added to any respectable dictionary that I can find, but is not an uncommon expression to see. My guess is that this word is a conflation of “ton” and “shitload”, and doesn’t appear to have been around for very long. It may, in fact, simply be another creation of the internet.
I love “shit-ton” because of the rarity of those back-to-back T’s. The advantage in this instance is that shit-ton must be spoken clearly in two full syllables. You cannot simply roll through those T’s without THINKING about them. And because we must speak “shit-ton” slowly, it seems to carry more weight. It is an expression with a shit-ton of meaning.
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 colleagues and bosses — and yet there never seems to be a time when one could actually say “well, that’s just sophistry!” You’d sound like a douche talking like that. In fact, the only time I can imagine when the word “sophistry” would come in handy is when you’re talking specifically about sophistry.
How did this happen? How did such a lovely and seemingly useful word get relegated to Word-of-the-Day calendars and campy blog posts?
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 of animate or inanimate actors, pandemonium is distinctly human. When pandemonium breaks out, you are royally fucked.
However, some dictionaries still define “pandemonium” as a “noisy place”, or simply “disorder”. Dictionary meanings always lag years, and sometimes decades, behind common accepted meanings. This leads me to believe that pandemonium is undergoing a sort of etymological promotion…from a meaning of low intensity to one of high intensity. Or, if I’m simply placing too strong an emphasis on this word, then I think it SHOULD be up for promotion.
Another cool thing about pandemonium: this word was actually invented by John Milton for Paradise Lost. For Milton, Pandaemonium was “the name of the palace built in the middle of Hell”. You do not get more fucking crazy than the palace in the middle of Hell (except perhaps the hot tub in the day spa in the palace in the middle of Hell). And this author LOVES when writers make up or repurpose words successfully.
There is a lot to love about this word.
- How many words can boast three E’s in the first four letters? (Okay, epee is one, but that word is lame).
- It has two Y’s, and we all love Y because it’s the underdog of the vowels; everybody wants to see more Y (it sleeps with both X and Z, what a slut!)
- It just sssslides off the tongue…eleeMOsynary…eleeMOsynary.
- Its meaning is a complete surprise: “of, relating to, or dependent on charity”.
- It weighs in at a bulky six syllables but moves like it’s three.
- It can actually be defined in less syllables than it takes to speak the word (i.e. “of charity”). And considering how few people are familiar with it, using it in public means…
- …there is no way to actually use this word without sounding like a complete suckfuck. Normally, I have a problem with this. But there is a point at which a word becomes so completely out of complete snooty proportion, it becomes loveable, like a bad movie, or a puppy with two broken legs and also somebody chopped its tail off and made it wear a stupid hat.
My first question: do people who work for charitable organizations get to use this word a lot? Do they call up donors and say “may we count on your eleemosynary contribution this year”? Of course, the recipient of that phone call would probably just hang up, but oh! Maybe the executives say it a lot! They’d be all like “our eleemosynary activities for the eleemosynary year are expanding in an eleemosynary way thanks to our eleemosynary phone banks working ’round the clock to raise eleemosynary capital”. And then the other guy would be all like, “dude, you are so high right now…”
My second question: does NPR know about this word? Considering their audience is pretty snooty, they could really bank it on this word. So you’d have Tom Ashbrook going, “we are, like, SOOO eleemosynary. Really really really eleemosynary. EleeMOsynary.”
For most people, this is not a hard word to love. Everybody loves sex, except for nuns, virgins, Mormons, and guys with very very small penises and the women who pretend to love them. But I love the word itself, not just its meaning. I love it because you take this complicated act, this act that dominates so much of our thinking, an activity that creates new worlds and destroys others, and you reduce it until you have a one syllable, three letter word. And not just any three letter word. It’s got the most common letter of all (“E”), the third most common consonant, letters everyone loves and is familiar with, and then you toss in that dirty little “X”. The S and the E would be NOTHING without that enticing X at the end. We love the X. It’s a filthy, slutty whore of a letter and it’s tag-teaming that innocent lowercase E. X isn’t just wrong, it’s even the symbol for “wrong” or “do not do”. That makes me hard.
Interesting “fact” about this word: D.H. Lawrence invented it. I’m pretty sure he also started the company DHL.
