You Know Big Words

When I finished high school my family moved to Ottawa and I moved from a city of 3 million people (Cleveland) to a city of 40,000 (Medicine Hat).  It actually saw tumbleweed rolling through the downtown bit (too small to be called a 'core') one day when I was trying to get to know the city.  Culture shock in so many ways!  While in The Hat I pretended to go to class and played basketball with the Rattlers at Medicine Hat College.  One day, one of my team mates asked me a question, "why do you use such big words?"  I can't remember my reply but I remember being stunned that someone thought I had a large vocabulary.  It always seemed about normal to me.  (Recently I drove through the hamlet of a town she was from in Saskatchewan and realized why I seemed so odd and perhaps in her eyes.)  Once in a while I drag up this memory as I learn a new word and have a giggle.

This term of Grad School has hit me at breakneck speed like a wall of ruddy, inflexible, unyielding bulwark of responsibilities.  It was inevitable as my last term started really slow.  My class schedule alone is bulky, but add being a TA and a Grader/Marker to the mix, while I begin to hunt down an adequate summer job and the term is going to be over like the flash of a light-bug's bum.  Here I sit taking a break from the 1.5 inches of reading I had to accomplish for this week's classes.  Much, much reading to complete.  It dawned on me that I have been using a dictionary more than I ever had over the last 2 weeks, and had a giggle as my use of large words does not include much of the language I am encountering at Grad School.  Last week while reading an article about consumer culture and the media I lowered the article from my face and yelled at the wall, "who writes like this!"  It seemed as though the thickness of the vocabulary was going to leave me stuck in a quagmire of stupidity.   Thanks to my phone App dictionary.com I have learned even more words and someday someone will scream at me, "who uses such high falutin' big language?"  One can only hope.

Below is the list of words I have had to familiarize myself with in order to understand what the hell I am supposed to be doing.

List of Words
January 4 - 24

• invidious
• emulation
• pecuniary
• conspicuous
• fetishism
• dataveillance
• cathect
• cathexis
• semiology
• fecundity (have heard the word for years but can never remember the definition)
• metonymy
• diasporic
• concomitant
• meme path
• parlysian
• torun
• concupiscent
• phylogistic
• grodno
• tautology
• evenescent
• sanguine
• intransigent
• perspicious
• subsumptive
• subsumption
• occlude
• indefatigable
• eidetic
• contrastive
• hypostatization
• reify
• multiphrenic
• ersatz (I have had to look this one up many times over.)
• aestheticized
• neurasthenia
• cognoscenti
• antinomial
• flaneurs (French)
• typology
• ephemeral
• interpellated
• poesies
• monolithic
• lacuna
• limen
• limina
• threshold
• communitas
• liminality
• serendipity
• discursive
• phlogistic

Yep, that is the list so far.  How did you do?  Do you feel smarter than me because you could actually use one or two of them in a sentence?  Good for you!   Feel free to leave me a comment your favourite word on the list, about a new word you have learned recently, or a story about feeling completely incompetent.  Go!  Learn!  Use big words!