Guest Post ~~ Arcane Words ~~ A Fish of Gold Specialty!

Hello People!

I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. Sorry about that. Been super busy most times and super lazy other times. Ha! I’ll have a post on Monday with a surprise. You won’t want to miss this one and I’m super excited! (I’ll give you a hint…it’s book related!)

Now onto my special guest poster for today. Many of us know her as Fishy, Goldy or Fish of Gold. I know her as ‘friend’. Please welcome a rare occurrence in Blogville, a guest post by our own Goldfish. Even though she is going through some difficult times, she volunteered to do a guest post for me. I feel honored. Thank you, Fishy! ❤

She’s here with some arcane words and their meanings. I love when she shows us some of the long forgotten words of days gone by. Take it away Fishy!

 

A long time ago, Jackie put out a request for guest posts. Since I love Jackie, I said I’d oblige. Then, as life does, my world exploded and I couldn’t find the time. I could barely find time to post on my own blog. The nagging knowledge that I still owed her a guest post ate away at me. So today, even though I still don’t have the time, I’m writing a guest post.

I asked Jackie for a prompt since coming up with things to say on other people’s blogs can sometimes be difficult. She said, “As for subjects, how about one of your famous arcane word posts? I love when you come up with old words and tell us what they are about.”

That’s what you’ll get. Here are some words that should be used more often. Some of them don’t even have synonyms.

cacaesthesia

noun

1 a morbid sensation
The cacaesthesia felt as if someone was walking on her grave.
2 (medical) abnormal dysfunctional sensations on the skin; a feeling of numbness, tingling, prickling, or a burning or cutting pain

Synonyms: (medical) paraesthesia

Alternate forms: cacaesthesia, cacesthesia, kakesthesia

Etymology: Modern Latin, from Greek aisthesis ‘feeling’ or ‘sensation,’ + Greek kakos ‘bad’

haplography 

noun

1. omission of syllables in words over time
The English word idolatry comes from the Greek eidololatreia, but one syllable has been lost through haplography.

Etymology: from Greek: haplo– ‘single’ + –graphy ‘writing’

haplology

noun

1. omission of a doubled or similar sound or syllable in a word
Her tendency to haplolgy continually made her misspell Mississippi as Missippi.
Etymology: from Greek: haplo– ‘single’ + logos ‘speech’

oncethmus

noun

1. a bray; the loud, harsh cry of a donkey or mule
2. spoken or written word continuing at length and in a tedious way
The oncethmus of politicians only gets worse once they’re elected.

Synonyms: bloviation, circumlocution, diffuseness, diffusion, garrulity, garrulousness, logorrhea, long-windedness, periphrasis, prolixity, redundancy, verbalism, verboseness, verbosity, windiness, wordage, wordiness

Etymology: Greek ὀγκηθµός ‘bray’

ostranenie

noun
1. defamiliarization
2. a sensation of being unfamiliar with something familiar
Have you ever experienced ostranenie when you think about your own name?
3. An artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance perception of the familiar. A central concept in 20th-century art and theory, ranging over movements including Dada, postmodernism, epic theatre, and science fiction, it is also used as a tactic by recent movements such as culture jamming.

Etymology: Russian остранение ‘defamiliarization’ first coined in 1917 by Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Device” (alternate translation: “Art as Technique”) (Crawford 209)

vorfreude

noun

1. joyful anticipation
She experienced vorfreude at the thought of summer vacation.

Etymology: German vor-‘pre-‘ (denotes primarily that something is before or in front of another thing or higher in a hierarchy) + freude ‘joy’

scaevity

noun

1. unluckiness
Scaevity caused him to fail.
2. left-handedness
She attributed her hard life to bad luck, but it was really scaevity.

Etymology: 1600s, unknown

 

 

Thank you again Fishy! I really appreciate the guest post and learning some new, old words!