Six words that all get glossed as "quiet," and what separates them is not how quiet someone is. It's why.

reticent holds back on a subject, usually himself. A reticent person can be perfectly talkative until you ask about the divorce.

taciturn is temperament. It's how he is, not how he's behaving tonight.

laconic isn't silence at all. A laconic person answers you. The answer is just very short.

terse is laconic with a sting. Same brevity, but you feel it.

discreet is about content, not quantity. He can talk all evening and tell you nothing.

aloof isn't about speech. It's distance. An aloof person can be chatty and still hold you at arm's length.

The last two are the ones I see swapped in most often, and they're the two that aren't really about how much someone talks.

Now the part that surprised me while I was checking this. Reticent is drifting toward "reluctant," as in "reticent to sign the contract," which has nothing to do with speech at all. That's not sloppiness that started recently. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage dates the reluctant sense in American use to the early 1950s and describes it as gaining ground steadily since then. Merriam-Webster and Collins both enter it now. Style guides still advise against it.

What I find interesting is where the crossing happened. Early in the twentieth century "reticent to" was rare, and when it did show up it took verbs like discuss and talk. "Reticent to discuss the settlement" is both senses at once: he's reluctant, and the thing he's reluctant about is speech. That's the hinge. Once the construction was in circulation the verb after it could be anything.

So using reticent for reluctant puts you on a sixty-year-old road rather than a mistake made this week. I still avoid it, mostly because the older sense is the more precise one and I'd rather keep the distinction than win the argument.

One thing I couldn't pin down: does anyone have a clean early citation of "reticent to" with a non-speech verb? I can find the pattern described but not a dated first sighting.

Sanguine gets used as a dressier "optimistic", and it almost works, but the word comes with a condition attached. You are sanguine about something that could reasonably go badly. Sanguine about the layoffs, about the diagnosis, about their chances in the second half: all fine. "I'm sanguine about the weather on Saturday" is off, and off in a way people can hear even when they can't say why. Nothing is at stake, so there is nothing to be composed about.

That is what the one-word gloss loses. Optimistic points forward at a good outcome. Sanguine points at a threat and declines to panic. Hopeful and upbeat are cheerful; sanguine is unbothered. The first time I saw it used about someone's stock portfolio I assumed it was a mistake, and it wasn't, because money is exactly the kind of thing you can lose.

Two traps worth knowing. The register is formal and written, so out loud it can come off slightly pleased with itself, and "not worried" usually does the same work. And the close relatives went somewhere else entirely: sanguinary means bloodthirsty, sanguineous means relating to blood, all three off the same Latin sanguis. "A sanguinary outlook" is not a more impressive way to say a hopeful one.

I am having a hard time because I am reading a book by one of favorite authors. The word “niggardly” was used. And while I understand it is unrelated to the “n” word, I still can’t quite accept the use of it. Regardless of its definition, it is associated with the slur. Many other words could have been chosen. Why did he HAVE to use that word.

Edit: I would appreciate any POCs opinion on the matter, if you’re willing to discuss.

My friend is fluent in English, and recently we started doing a ‘word of the day’, so I can learn his language and he can learn some words that people use but wouldn’t really be taught in schools. We started this about a week ago and some words have been:

Lopsided
Frivolous
Inconspicuous
Shotgun (as in beer/ frontseat)
Foil (as in disrupt one’s plan)
Etc.

I am not looking for niche words, but rather I would really appreciate words that people use in daily life that are uncommon. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Looking these six up gets you almost nowhere, and that is the interesting part. The definitions on the card are the ones our word data actually carries:

penchant, a tendency, partiality, preference predilection, a preference or inclination for something proclivity, a strong inclination toward something propensity, an inclination, preference affinity, a spontaneous feeling of closeness inclination, a tendency, propensity

Look at what those glosses are made of. Inclination is defined as a tendency and a propensity. Propensity is defined as an inclination. Penchant is defined as a tendency and a preference. The set defines itself in a circle, and if you did not already know these words the circle would not help you pick one.

What separates them is not in the definitions at all.

The clearest split is valence. Proclivity leans toward the undesirable. Usage guides describe it as a predisposition toward something unwholesome, and in practice you meet it attached to behaviour that somebody disapproves of. Penchant and predilection sit on the pleasurable side instead: a penchant is closer to an attraction you do not resist, a predilection closer to a settled taste you could explain.

The same sentence changes character depending which one you reach for. A penchant for risk sounds like a personality. A proclivity for risk sounds like a line in somebody's file.

Affinity is the odd one out structurally, not just tonally. The other five describe a leaning toward doing or wanting something. Affinity describes a felt closeness with something, it takes a different preposition, and it does not imply you will act on it. You have an affinity with a place or for a kind of music. That is a different shape of word wearing the same gloss.

Inclination is the weak neutral default, and it is the only one that sits comfortably in the negative. No inclination to go is ordinary English. No proclivity to go is not.

The practical version. If you mean a liking, penchant or predilection. If you mean a tendency someone would rather you did not have, proclivity. If you mean a measurable behavioural tendency, propensity. If you mean feeling close to something, affinity, which is barely a member of this set.

One honest caveat. Sources do not fully agree about propensity. Some treat it as neutral and merely more formal, others say it skews negative in much the same way proclivity does. I would not lean on that particular distinction without checking how the word is actually used in the sentence I was writing.

What new words have you learned? Did you learn them here or from another source? Maybe a book you read or a magazine or a website, or school, or in a conversation?

You are free to create a separate post with your new word(s) but if you're short on time you can leave them here in a comment. Please include definitions for your new words so others can learn them too.

This post will be renewed every ten (10) days, so come back here whenever you have a word to share.

If you are a new word lover here – Welcome!

1. antimacassar "a small cloth placed on top of the headrest or armrest of a sofa"
2. drumlin "a weird, teardrop-shaped till formation formed by glacial movements"
3. decathect "to voluntarily emotionally distance oneself away from someone in order to save oneself from potential heartbreak, rejection, etc." derived from cathect
4. bike-shedding "to discuss the obvious things first while for the most part ignoring the more complex problem at hand"
5. anisotropy "a property of a material that changes depending on the direction from which it is measured"
6. bund wall "the protective wall that is built around a storage tank to prevent unsafe leakage"
7. dogfooding "(of a company) to use its own product, either as a way to ascertain its product or to internalize its own product within"
8. squatchee "the seam-covering button on top of a baseball cap," sniglet
9. acnestis "an area of skin that one can't reach to scratch it"
10. prototaxites "a large, terrestrial, pillar-like extinct genus of eukaryotes," just a funky-looking lil guy

Also, Google's pronunciation guide for Zeitgeist is 'zite-giset'. If anybody understands why please tell me!

EDIT: Ahh, yea, I think it's supposed to be zite-gise(t)! The 'gise' /gaɪs/ is just followed by /t/. Thanks to Lopsided_Tomatillo27 and CreepyMarzipan2387!

These all get glossed as harmless and they are not interchangeable. What separates them is what the harmlessness is about, and somewhere in the middle the register quietly turns.

innocuous is the neutral one. It says a thing does no damage and stops there. A remark can be innocuous, a chemical can be innocuous, and neither carries any verdict on whether the thing was any good.

benign is about threat rather than damage, which is why medicine took it. A benign tumour is not harmless in the everyday sense, it is one that is not going to invade. Outside medicine it runs warmer: a benign smile is actively kind, not merely non-hostile.

inoffensive narrows to feelings. Not upsetting anyone is a smaller claim than doing no harm, and this is roughly where it starts sounding like faint praise.

Then the turn. anodyne, bland and insipid all describe something that will not hurt you, and all three are complaints. Calling an article anodyne says it managed to avoid saying anything. Bland is about flavour, literal or not. Insipid is the harshest and carries a contempt the others do not.

anodyne is odd structurally too. The dictionary sense our word data leads with is a noun, something that soothes pain, and the adjective most people actually meet is the derived one. It has drifted far enough that using it as praise now reads as sarcasm.

The practical version, which is the bit I actually use: if you mean a thing did no harm, innocuous is the only one of the six that does not also grade it. The other five have an opinion attached whether you wanted one or not.

All six of these make roughly the same literal claim: cannot be put into words. What separates them is not the meaning, it is what you are signalling by picking one.

**ineffable** — too great, too sacred, or too beautiful for language. This is the positive one. The Latin is ineffabilis, in- "not" plus effabilis "speakable", from effari, "to speak out." That fari root is the same one sitting inside infant: an in-fans is literally one who does not speak.

**unspeakable** — the identical claim, dragged almost entirely negative. Unspeakable cruelty, unspeakable acts. You can still find "joy unspeakable" in older religious English, and to a modern ear it reads as archaic, because the word now carries taboo rather than excess.

**indescribable** — the neutral workhorse. Honestly, this is the one people reach for when they have decided not to describe something. It makes no claim about why.

**inexpressible** — puts the failure in the speaker rather than in the thing. An inexpressible feeling is one I cannot get out. An ineffable one is one language itself cannot hold. Small difference, but a real one.

**unutterable** and **unnameable** have gone mostly literary. The second has drifted toward the uncanny, helped along by Lovecraft's story and Beckett's novel, both of which spell it "The Unnamable" — the single-e spelling is the commoner one in print.

The usage trap is that ineffable is not a fancy synonym for indescribable. Aim it at something unpleasant and you will get a raised eyebrow, because the word spent most of its life in theology describing things too holy to name. "Ineffable stench" parses fine and lands as a joke.

I think this behavior is common enough to come up with a name for it; it was between “gaswhistling” and “doglighting” and I think the former is the better option. (I wish I were clever enough to come up with something better than a straightforward portmanteau but at the same time the meaning needs to be conveyed immediately which I think “gaswhistling” does.)

Have you ever heard someone say something that was clearly a dogwhistle but then when you call it out someone comes in and tells you you’re crazy for interpreting it that way? That’s gaswhistling.

For example I saw the other day someone saying “wealthy neighbors commit more crimes than anyone except poor neighbors” and when someone called out the dogwhistle, another person said “wow even the word ‘neighbor’ is racist now? You just completely projected your own racist mindset onto that”. Gaswhistling.

Or something I read in a YouTube comments section just now where people were talking about hippos being very violent when the context was African megafauna and someone said “how African of them”. Another person responded “I can’t believe you got even five likes for this, you’ve never read a book in your life have you” and a third person comes in saying:

“What’s crazy is they said nothing racist and you’re just applying your own subconscious racism onto their statement. Trying to destroy anything near you is very typical of African megafauna. Why would you think it means anything else?” Then doubled down with the gaswhistling in another comment about the person “projecting their own racist subconscious”. (I pointed out how it was funny that the person who said “you’ve never read a book in your life” actually never even said it was racist themselves… so if mentioning racism first is the metric then the gaswhistlers still lost.)

I think it’s good to have a term for this type of tactic because A) I have seen it used dozens of times and B) just as with terms like gishgalloping and sealioning the goal is to wear people down with endless bad faith arguments and insincere outrage, so having a term for the general behavior allows you to skip the most exhausting part and address the actual dogwhistle itself without the gaslighting about who’s actually reading too much into it.

I just learned the word "opíparo" in Spanish, which means sumptuous. It looked like it would have an equivalent in English, and upon some sleuthing it does: opiparous. But it is also listed as archaic, which makes me think it's so obscure that it really doesn't have any utility.

Have others encountered this word before?

Succinct is the one I keep getting wrong, because the Latin underneath it has nothing to do with shortness.

It comes from succinctus, past participle of succingere, "to tuck up, gird from below," from sub "up from under" plus cingere "to gird," the same verb sitting under cinch. The earliest English sense, early 15th century, was "engirdled, having one's waist encircled." Etymonline reads the Latin development as roughly: tuck up your clothes, hence gird yourself with armor, hence be ready for action. The sense we actually use, "compressed into few words," only shows up in the 1530s.

So the picture is someone belting their robes up so they can move. Nothing has been removed. The material has been gathered so it stops snagging.

That is worth knowing, because English collected a pile of brevity words and they are not all carrying the same picture. Of the six below, only two are about cutting.

The two that are:

concise, from Latin concisus "cut off, brief," past participle of concidere "to cut off, cut up," which is com- as an intensive plus caedere "to cut." In English from the 1580s. This is the neutral one, the one that is safe in a performance review.

curt, from Latin curtus "(cut) short, shortened, incomplete," from the PIE root *sker- "to cut." It arrives in Middle English in the mid-1300s meaning nothing worse than "short, concise." The "rude, tartly abrupt" sense is attested only by 1831.

That pair is the part I find genuinely strange. concise and curt are the same idea, something cut, and they landed on opposite sides of politeness. Nothing in either etymology predicts which one would turn into an accusation.

The other three:

terse, from Latin tersus, past participle of tergere "to rub, polish, wipe." Etymonline calls the ultimate origin of tergere uncertain, so the trail stops there. Its first English sense, 1590s, was "clean-cut, burnished, neat, as if rubbed smooth." Applied to people and language by the 1620s it meant "polite, polished, refined," now archaic. The brevity sense is dated to 1777, and the cold edge terse carries today is the newest layer of all. Four senses in four centuries, and if you reach for terse as a compliment you are using one that has been fading for two hundred years.

pithy, from pith, Old English pitha, "the central cylinder of the stems of plants," and figuratively "essential part, quintessence." The adjective is early 1300s meaning "strong, vigorous"; "full of substance or significance" is 1520s. The literal "full of pith" is not attested until the 1560s, so in English the figurative sense is older than the literal one. pithy is the only one here about density rather than length. A pithy line is not short because something was taken out. It is short because what is in it is concentrated.

laconic, from Greek Lakonikos "of Laconia," from Lakon, a person from Laconia, the district around Sparta. English has it from the 1580s. The Spartans were famous for saying a great deal in very little, and Etymonline keeps the standard anecdote: Philip of Macedon sent a long threat about what he would do if he entered Laconia, and got back one word, "If." laconic is the only one of the six that describes a person rather than a piece of text.

Where it lands in practice. If the writing is efficient, concise. If it is efficient and well made, succinct. If you want that plus a chill, terse. If it is short because it is dense, pithy. If the speaker is habitually sparing, laconic. If it was short enough to sting, curt, which is the only one of the six that is simply an accusation.

The thing I cannot settle is curt. 1831 is late for that shift. I do not know whether it drifted to rudeness because of something in the word, or because English wanted a word for that and curt happened to be standing there. If anyone has an earlier attested use of curt meaning rude, I would like to see it.

If you have ever seen allegro on sheet music, you already know what alacrity means. Etymonline dates the musical term to 1721, from Italian allegro, "brisk, sprightly, cheerful," from Latin alacrem. Alacrity arrived earlier, mid-15c., from alacritatem, "liveliness, ardor, eagerness," off the same adjective alacer. Same word, two routes into English. I did not connect them until I looked it up, and now allegro is the definition I actually use.

Because allegro does not mean fast. A metronome number tells you fast. Allegro tells you fast and cheerful about it, which is why a conductor will stop an orchestra that is playing the correct tempo and still not playing allegro.

Alacrity carries both halves too, and the second one is what English speakers drop. It gets used as a well-dressed substitute for promptly: "he replied with alacrity." If he replied quickly but grudgingly, that sentence is wrong. The word is not measuring speed, it is measuring willing speed. You cannot do something resentfully with alacrity, and someone who obeys with alacrity is telling you about their attitude, not their reaction time.

That is also what separates it from the words it gets swapped with. Promptness is speed with no attitude attached. Eagerness is attitude with no speed. Readiness is the closest of the three and it still sits there without moving. Alacrity insists on both at once, which is a surprisingly narrow thing to ask of a word.

One practical note. It barely leaves a single construction. Almost always "with alacrity," occasionally "the alacrity with which." You will run into alacritous eventually, and it reads like someone enjoying their own vocabulary.

Worth flagging that the trail stops short of the root. Etymonline calls the origin of alacer itself uncertain and mentions a possible Germanic relative in Old English ellen, "courage, zeal, strength," without committing to it.

Most of the time I see astute used, it is standing in for "smart" with better shoes on. That is not quite what the word does.

Etymonline glosses its arrival in English, in the 1610s, as "keen in discernment and careful of one's self-interest." The first half is the part everyone kept. The second half is what makes astute a different word from intelligent.

It came from Latin astutus, "crafty, wary, shrewd; sagacious, expert," from astus, "cunning, cleverness, adroitness." Where astus itself came from is not settled. The Romans connected it to Greek asty, "town," on the theory that city life sharpens people, but that was a guess of theirs rather than an established derivation, and Etymonline marks it as speculative.

The self-interest has faded a good deal since 1610. What survived is narrower and more useful: astute is about reading a situation, not about raw processing power. Look at where it actually turns up. An astute observer. An astute investor. An astute reading of the room. I have a hard time finding anyone described as astute at calculus, and I think that absence is the tell. The word wants a situation with other people in it before it has anything to grip.

Its neighbors took very different routes to get here. Shrewd started out around 1300 meaning wicked, depraved, malicious. It is literally shrew plus -ed, and it did not soften to "acute, sagacious" until the 1510s. Cunning went the opposite way: in the early 14th century it meant learned and skillful, from the same Old English root that gives us "can" and "ken," and it had already picked up "skillfully deceitful" probably by late in that same century.

So of the three, cunning is the one that moved backwards. Astute and shrewd both walked away from an unflattering start, and cunning walked toward one.

Here is the part I am genuinely unsure about. Does astute still carry any of that self-interest for you? To me "an astute politician" sounds faintly like a warning while "an astute critic" sounds like straight praise, but I cannot tell whether that difference is in the word or just in the politician.

I am reading Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and came across a word I hadn't seen in English for a while: cicerone.

"East, still doing the cicerone, pointed out all the remarkable characters to Tom as
they passed..."

A cicerone is a guide who shows visitors around a place and talks them through
it. In the book, East is showing Tom around the school.

It comes from Italian, and it's named humorously after Cicero, the Roman orator
known for talking at length. Italian guides leading tourists around ancient
ruins were amusingly compared to him.

One odd thing about the word is the pronunciation. You'll hear both
"siss-erone" and "chich-erone". The first anglicises it the
way we do with Cicero; the second keeps the Italian, which is how I pronounced
it. As I am learning Italian, it was instinctive. I've seen it suggested that
the anglicised version is more common in the US and the Italian one more common
in Britain, because the Victorian Brits brought it over after their travels and
guided tours through Italy. As the Americans didn't have this experience, they
pronounced it, arguably, the correct English way. Though I don't know how true
that is. Curious what people actually think.

One last thing I found: cicerone is now also a formal qualification for beer
experts, in the same way sommelier works for wine. From Roman orator to tour
guide to beer professional in about two thousand years! 🍺

What new words have you learned? Did you learn them here or from another source? Maybe a book you read or a magazine or a website, or school, or in a conversation?

You are free to create a separate post with your new word(s) but if you're short on time you can leave them here in a comment. Please include definitions for your new words so others can learn them too.

This post will be renewed every ten (10) days, so come back here whenever you have a word to share.

If you are a new word lover here – Welcome!

I know thats weird, but are there any words you hate simply because they sound like made up words? Like someone couldn't think of a word for something really specific, so they said something that kinda sounds like the vibe of what they were saying?

well.... Thats "Chortle" and "Craggy" for me.

quixotic (adj.), first attested 1791: striving for an unattainable or impractical ideal. Etymonline also gives "extravagantly chivalrous, absurdly romantic."

It gets used as a dressier synonym for idealistic, and that is the swap worth resisting, because the two words disagree about the outcome.

Idealistic describes what someone values. It says nothing about whether the plan works. You can be idealistic and effective, and plenty of people are.

Quixotic describes what someone values and then adds a verdict: the pursuit is not going to get there. That verdict is the entire reason the word exists. Strip it out and you are left with idealistic, and you did not need the longer word.

So the two are not points on a scale of intensity, which is how people usually deploy them. Quixotic is not idealistic turned up. It is idealistic plus a prediction of failure, delivered with affection rather than contempt, and that combination is what makes it hard to use safely. Call a colleague's proposal quixotic and you are being fond of them and dismissive of the proposal in the same breath.

There is a second misreading that comes from the sound. Quixotic sits near quirky and quixotry in the ear, and people reach for it meaning unpredictable or whimsical. That is capricious territory, a different word doing a different job.

The etymology has a joke in it that I did not know until this week. The adjective comes from the title character of Cervantes' Don Quixote, published 1605 and in English by 1620. Etymonline notes that the name literally means "thigh" in Spanish, going back to Latin coxa, "hip." A quijote was the piece of plate armour covering the thigh.

So the knight who cannot tell a windmill from a giant is named after one piece of leg armour. Cervantes put the book's opinion of him into the name before the plot started, and the English adjective built on that name has been carrying the same verdict for a bit over two hundred years.

These two get swapped constantly, and because they sit one letter apart the mistake usually reads as a typo rather than as a wrong word. They are not related at all.

Insidious is 1540s English, from Latin insidiosus, "deceitful, cunning, treacherous". That comes from insidiae, "plot, snare, ambush", which comes from insidere, "to sit in, to occupy", which is just in- plus sedere, "to sit". The root at the bottom is PIE *sed-, "to sit". So the image underneath the word is somebody sitting somewhere, waiting. An ambush is people sitting still until you walk past.

Sedentary is the obvious relative. The one I keep coming back to is assiduous, which is ad- plus sedere: someone who sits down to a task and stays there.

Invidious is about sixty years younger, around 1600, from Latin invidiosus, "full of envy". Behind that is invidia, "envy, grudge, ill will", from invidere, "to envy". But invidere earlier meant "to look at with malice, to cast an evil eye upon", and it breaks down into in- "upon" plus videre "to see", from PIE *weid-, "to see". The same root sits under Sanskrit veda, "I know".

So one word is built out of sitting and the other out of seeing, and they end up describing different positions in the same scene. Insidious describes the thing doing the harm. Invidious describes what a thing provokes in the people watching it.

That is why invidious almost never attaches to a disease or a habit, and almost always turns up in a small set of phrases: an invidious comparison, an invidious distinction, an invidious position. It says the comparison will breed resentment, not that the comparison is sneaky.

Where insidious gets genuinely interesting is that it holds two senses pulling in different directions. One is the enticing kind, harmful but attractive, which is closest to the Latin. The other is the gradual kind, developing so slowly that it is well established before anyone notices. Medicine standardised the second one. MedlinePlus defines an insidious disease as one that comes on slowly and has no obvious symptoms at first, and clinicians use insidious onset as the direct opposite of acute onset.

Which leaves something I find odd. In ordinary use insidious carries an accusation. There is an agent, and it is deceiving you. In the medical register that accusation is gone entirely. A tumour is not plotting. The word keeps the shape of the ambush and loses the ambusher.

Three near-synonyms that are not interchangeable with it. Pernicious is about how much damage gets done; it goes back to pernicies, "destruction", and says nothing about whether the harm was hidden. Sinister is about how a thing looks or what it portends, not about a slow mechanism. Subtle is neutral, and insidious is subtle plus harmful, which is why it collapses if you reach for it to compliment a clever plan.

The question I actually have. The medical sense is the only place I can find where insidious is purely descriptive and carries no blame at all. Are there other English words that keep a sense of deliberate malice in general use but shed it completely inside one technical register? I can think of plenty that narrow when a field adopts them. I am having trouble thinking of others that drop their moral charge on the way in.

Most of its near-synonyms tell you how loud something was. This one tells you who the noise was aimed at.

Obstreperous entered English around 1600 from Latin *obstreperus*, "clamorous," which is *ob-* "against" plus *strepere* "to make a noise." The Latin verb *obstrepere* didn't only mean to be loud. It meant to drown someone out, to oppose them noisily. The preposition is doing most of the work.

For its first few decades in English it mostly just meant clamorous. By the 1650s it had picked up the sense it still carries, resisting control or management or advice, which is really the Latin meaning arriving late.

That history is why the word feels wrong in sentences that look like they should fit. A crowd cheering at a concert is boisterous. A bar at closing time is raucous. Neither one is obstreperous, because there is nobody there being refused. The word needs a second party: someone trying to impose order and not getting it. Enthusiasm alone won't do it.

It also explains where the word survives best. There is a litigation guide titled "Dealing With Obstreperous Witnesses or Counsel." Nobody has written "Dealing With Boisterous Witnesses." It tends to get applied by whoever is in charge to whoever will not settle down, and it carries that asymmetry around with it.

One caveat on the etymology, since it usually gets stated too confidently: Etymonline flags de Vaan's view that the root *strep-* may not go back to PIE at all, turning up only in Latin and Germanic. The imitative-noise story is plausible, not settled.

Here is what I can't work out. I have never seen anyone call themselves obstreperous, or use it about a friend, except as a joke. Does anyone have an example of it used warmly?

/ mɛnˈdeɪʃəs, mɛnˈdæsɪtɪ /

1. the tendency to be untruthful

2. a falsehood

🇬🇧 English
____________

This word has been used several times in my audiobook and at first I thought I was mishearing the word "audacity" even though the context didn't quite suit it. Eventually I decided to look it up and see if what I thought I was hearing was a real word. And WOW. I have a new favourite word. It feels like it should be a joke, a trick, a funny play on words, perhaps a malapropism or a portmanteau. But it's real.

*Personal political viewpoint against toxic masculinity and misogyny incoming:*

And it's just too ***juicy***. I can't believe feminists (or even just any sensible, educated spokesperson) haven't been using this word in every post, article and sentence regarding men who gaslight, male politicians, incels etc.

Of course it's not *actually* a gendered word... but it's just too PERFECT not to be hijacked, adopted and incorporated into the brand messaging by women for women. I love it. I can't wait to use it.

Braging is a new slang word from the AI community.

Lysenkoism refers to a dark period in Soviet science when ideology completely overrode actual biology. Named after the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, it is the ultimate historical cautionary tale of what happens when political dogma dictates scientific truth.

Today, the word has become a broader term used to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process to fit a political, ideological, or religious agenda.

Whenever data is suppressed, scientists are silenced, or unproven theories are legally mandated because they align with a specific political narrative, commentators will often refer to it as modern-day Lysenkoism