by Kevin Burton
I missed it and didn’t get to participate, but Merriam-Webster had a notice on social media inviting readers to vote for their favorite underused words.
The dictionary published the results under the headline “12 Underrated Words That Deserve More Love.” I don’t agree with all the choices, but there was no way I wasn’t going to look.
Perusing that list reminded me of the wonders of the discount bin at a record store, when we used to have record stores. You never knew when you’d find a gem there. Rarely did I walk away from one of those without looking at everything, top to bottom.
If you were lukewarm on Jennifer Warnes Greatest Hits, well the price was right, and you got “Right Time of the Night” and “I Know a Heartache When I See One.”
Grocery stores have sale bins too. There you have the added task of checking expiration dates.
Words don’t expire per se, but sometimes they smell that way. Some of these words I will leave in the bin, feel free to grab them if you like. Here’s the list, with my comments beneath each word meaning:
1-Crepuscular: of, relating to, or resembling twilight
The early Romans had two words for the twilight. Crepusculum was favored by Roman writers for the half-light of evening, just after the sun sets; diluculum was reserved for morning twilight, just before the sun rises—it is related to lucidus, meaning “bright.” We didn’t embrace either of these Latin nouns as substitutes for our word twilight, but we did form the adjective crepuscular in the 17th century. The word’s zoological sense, relating to animals that are most active at twilight, developed in the 19th century.
KB’s take: I don’t have another word for twilight, but I don’t need one.
2-Soliloquy: a poem, discourse, or utterance of a character in a drama that has the form of a monologue or gives the illusion of being a series of unspoken reflections
Soliloquy and monologue cover very similar ground, but there are some important differences between the two words. At its most basic level, soliloquy—from the Latin solus (“alone”) and loqui (“to speak”)—refers to the act of talking to oneself, and more specifically denotes the solo utterance of an actor in a drama. It tends to be used of formal or literary expressions, such as Hamlet’s soliloquies.
Monologue (from Greek monos “alone” and legein “to speak”) may also refer to a dramatic scene in which an actor soliloquizes, but it has other meanings as well. To a stand-up comedian, monologue denotes a comic routine. To a bored listener, it signifies a long speech uttered by someone who has too much to say.
KB’s take: I have always thought soliloquy had a negative connotation, that whatever was being said was overblown. Good thing I have never used the word (and still won’t).
3-Quidnunc: a person who seeks to know all the latest news or gossip
Tom Jones, famous Welshman, famous crooner, famous quidnunc? “What’s new?” is a question every busybody wants answered, whether by pussycats or not. Latin-speaking Nosey Parkers might have used some version of the expression “quid nunc,” literally “what now,” to ask the same question.
Appropriately, the earliest documented English use of quidnunc to refer to a gossiper appeared in 1709 in Sir Richard Steele’s famous periodical, The Tatler. Steele is far from the only writer to ply quidnunc in his prose, however. You also can find the word among the pages of works by such writers as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But don’t think the term is old news—it sees some use in current publications, too.
KB’s take: Please stop with that.
4-Pumpernickel: a dark coarse sourdough bread made of unbolted rye flour
Look, we’re just gonna cut the cheese to the chase: Pumpernickel comes from the German words pumpern (“to break wind”) and Nickel (“goblin”), apparently due to the bread’s indigestibility. Do what you will with this information.
KB’s take: Don’t like rye bread, don’t need the word.
5-Tessellation: a surface decoration made by inlaying small pieces of variously colored material to form pictures or patterns (in other words, a mosaic or something resembling a mosaic)
The oldest tesserae were small pieces of marble and limestone cut in cubical or other regular shapes for mosaic work. Tessera comes from the Latin tessera (same spelling and meaning) and probably ultimately from the Greek word tessares meaning “four” (as it happens, tessares is also related to the English word four).
Latin tilers (and admirers thereof) also used tessella as a diminutive of tessera, and it’s this word that led eventually to the verb tessellate (“to form into or adorn with mosaic”) and noun tessellation. For more fun tessellation facts, make sure to celebration World Tessellation Day, which is observed every year on the seventeenth of June.
KB’s take: Mosaic is fine. I’ll stick to that.
6-Cadence: a rhythmic sequence or flow of sounds in language
A cadence is a rhythm, or a flow of words or music, in a sequence that is regular (or steady as it were). But lest we be mistaken, cadence also lends its meaning to the sounds of Mother Nature (such as birdsong) to be sure.
Cadence comes from Middle English borrowed from Medieval Latin’s own cadentia, a lovely word that means “rhythm in verse.” (You may also recognize a cadence cousin, sweet cadenza, as a word that is familiar in the opera universe.) And from there our cadence traces just a little further backward to the Latin verb cadere “to sound rhythmically, to fall.” Praise the rising and the falling of the lilting in our language, whether singing songs or rhyming or opining on it all.
KB’s take: Cadence is underused? Not in my neighborhood!
Tomorrow, more word nuggets (and not nuggets) from Merriam-Webster readers.
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