Language Archives

The adjective gauche means “lacking social grace”, “awkward”, or “crude”.

A foppotee is a simple-minded person. I found this one on Save the Words, and according to The Phrontistery’s list of lost words, foppotee was used in 1663 and is now extinct.

The adjective effusive means “overflowing”, “extravagantly demonstrative”, or “unrestrained or excessive in emotional expression”. The verb form to effuse means “to pour out” or “to radiate”.

The lovely German word ersatz is both an adjective meaning “serving as a substitute” and a noun meaning “an artificial or inferior substitute”.

To bowlderize means “to remove material that is considered offensive or objectionable” from a book or other written work.

I recently discovered Save The Words, an effort (actually, just an ad campaign) by the Oxford Dictionary to rescue obscure English words in danger of extinction. So, the first one that caught my eye was jussulent, which means “full of broth or soup”.

Reification is the “act of materializing”. In other words, to reify is “to convert into or regard as a concrete thing”. Another more specific definition describes it as “representing a human being as a physical thing deprived of personal qualities or individuality”.

To flocculate means “to aggregate or coalesce into small lumps or loose clusters”.

Here’s a long adjective with a short definition: incontrovertible means “not open to question”, “indisputable”, “impossible to deny”, or, to put it another way, “necessarily or demonstrably true”.

Yup, frigorific really is a word. It means “causing or producing cold”.