Word Wednesday

As usual on a Wednesday, nothing is happening.

Every day that I post, I also put up a "Word of the Day". Most - almost all - of these words are ones that I ran across reading books at some time. When I see a word used in a book that I don't know, I look it up in a dictionary. Then I put it onto a 4x6 index card with the meaning and sometimes with the quote as it appeared in the book with proper citation This particularly helps for unusual words; having the original usage really helps one understand the meaning better.

This study method is one that I started in high school about 40 years ago. I still have some of those old index cards. My handwriting was surely a lot better then. At that time I had decided I needed to improve my verbal skills. Another motivation was listening to the old television show "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley. He had an enormous vocabulary that he used orally.

An old term for a word that is not common, but does appear occasionally is a $10 word. For fun, I value the words that are put into my card file with a system having bit more precision. Here's the system:

$10 word - a word that you need a normal dictionary to find the meaning. A normal dictionary costs about $10, which correlates nicely with the word value.

$100 word - a word that you need an unabridged dictionary to find the meaning. An unabridged dictionary costs about $100, hence that higher value.

$1000 word - a word that one needs the Oxford English Dictionary [OED] to find the meaning. The OED covers about five feet on my bookshelves with large volumes about 12" high. My copy of the OED cost about $1,000.

$10,000 word - a word that is not even in the Oxford English Dictionary, usually arising in a specialized field. The word value correlates with the cost of a yearlong course in graduate school. Often I have to "google" those words or use dictionary.com.

By the way, if you just "sort of" know the meaning (perhaps from context), BUT can't precisely define it in your mind, the word is at least a $10 word. Sometimes I'm surprised when my contextual understanding is a bit off.

Reading the writings of good writers, especially nonfiction, will bring lots of new words to your attention. One very fruitful source of good writing and new words are the works of H. L. Mencken.

My card file now has about 1,000 words and I'm still adding.

Markets

A fall yesterday. The usual suspect is the drop in consumer confidence. Perhaps that's the excuse, but with the jobs situation and its trend, S&P over 1100 seems high to me. I'm holding my puts and waiting.

Word of the Day

"Cacoëpy" - noun [$1000] rare. [ca-'co-e-py with a long 'o' and long 'e']
Cacoëpy means bad or erroneous pronunciation; opposed to orthoëpy. Hence cacoëpistic is the adjective.
Sentence: Cacoëpy is a word that often is an occurrence of its own meaning by cacoëpistic pronunciation. George W. Bush could not say "nuclear" without cacoëpy - he always say nu-cu-lar. I guess that was his least damaging mistake.

By the way, the two dots over the 'e' mean - in English - that the letter is pronounced separately and not part of the diphthong. Those are often left off in modern printing, but appear in older books and in dictionaries sometimes. Marks like that are called diacritic marks and this particular one is called a trema or diaeresis in the English language. [In German the marks mean something else]. A word I saw recently in a book printed in 1922 was naïve, which properly needs the diacritic marks to indicate its pronunciation. One runs across lots of these in foreign languages.

These marks can be made on my computer by holding the Alt key down and typing the proper numeric code on the number pad. ë is Alt-0235.