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Vocabulary Study: Arcane

Some odd words pile.

medical oddities

• halitosis │ (dragon mouth) that Princeses Diana has halitosis... [Time Mag. 2001-02-05]
• flatulence │ fart.
• fibrillation │ the twitching of an eye.
• tinnitus │ the ringing sound in the ear
• expectorate │ hawking phlegm. Some Cold medicine will have the word “expectorant” on its label, meaning it soothes cough or resolve phlegm.
• horripilation │ goose bumps

• brachydactylia │ Having abnormally short fingers or toes.
• microcephalic │ small head. some people are microcephalic, while others are macrocephalic.

medical quacks

• homeopathy │ minute dosage as a cure.
• chiropractic │ all illness came from the spine
• reflexology
• osteopathy

✻ ✻ ✻

• dildo │ From Bible, Ezekiel seventeen it seems dildoes cause some real whining. “Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredome with them.”
• galling │ As for the “rightness” of using a case-preserving, case-insensitive filesystem, though... well, I come from a UNIX-geek background myself, and it was many galling years before I understood why it was designed that way in the first place. [an email comment on Apple's HSF file system by Brian Tiemann, published on http://www.birdhouse.org/macos/beos_osx/redux.html]
• paraplegia │ in the movie _Born on the 4th of July_ starring Tom Cruze, the Ron Kovic guy was a paraplegic. Be amused at the scene when he is about to demo to his mon how he pee, and laugh at the scene where he's about to make love to a Mexican prostitute. Whilist his ex-marines buddy (one of the few goodmen, also wasted from the waist down), merry-making with two New York chicks. Be a war-mongering hero!
• palpation │ exame by touching. Like how a family doctor touches your neck, chest, belly, and groins.
• palsy │ reminds me of The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe.
• numismatics │ coin collecting
• ventral │ dorsal fin, ventral fin.
• entomology
• epilepsy
• fatalism │ belief in fate.
• determinism │ a word from 19th century science. With today's science, we know that things deterministic can be unpredictable
• bowdlerize
• catechism
• escapism │ escapism is essentially inflicts self-damage, but perhaps slight escapism behavior has psychological benefits, ultimately beneficial to the individual. The ultimate escapism is of course suicide. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapism .
• ageism
• homology │ Math term. Requires a math degree to understand.
• incontinent │ one who pisses all over the place involuntarily, or fuck around thusly.
• pederast
• dystopia │ opposite of utopia.
• gastrointestinal
• protectionism │ uneducated stupidity
• philander │ playboy, womanizer. e.g. Bill Clinton.
• senescent │ Aging (or the beginning of the senescent process) officially begins at age 29-33 [PK in email]
• polygamy │ polygamy means the combination of polygyny and polyandry. Both of which are practiced thru-out animal kingdom, including Homo Sapiens. cuckold
• tribalism
• aleatory
• corolla │ the ring around the cock can be termed corolla, poetically. Here we are using a simile, supposing that a cock is a flower, complete with head and stem, and produces honey suitable for reproduction as well as consumption.
• tercentenary │ 300
• gerontology │ ...Aunt May, as her family calls her — received the honor last week after it was discovered by gerontology researchers that her birthday, June 12, 1889, was exactly a week older than the previous title holder [oldest living American, 113 years old]. [KPIX/KCBS online news on 2002 Nov 7]
• eponymous │ they may have had conflicting ideas about the magazine's content, but Rosie O'Donnell and the publisher of her eponymous magazine share a vision of how to resolve the problem: lawsuites. [Time mag, 2000-10-14]
• urticate │ whip, flog, thrash
• benthos
• ataraxia
• logorrhea
• corrigendum │ “The corrigendum is free”. [Erik Naggum in comp.lang.lisp 2002-08 about a manual.]
• necromancy │ talking to the dead
• psychosomatic │ somatic, but psychological, as in: stomach pain during an impinging exam or job interview
• neologism
• Nemesis │ goddess of vengeance
• Kinesiology │ Kinesiology researchers might be better at true health, provided they aren't in the employ of money-making sports programs.
• mycology
• sutra │ Hindu doctrines, e.g. Kamasutra [see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_Sutra ]
• exoskeletons │ The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative research proposals on Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation (EHPA). [from the web]
• paleontology
• anacoluthon │ When I was a kid, my Washington journalist parents and their journalist friends condescended to Dwight Eisenhower as the fatuous golfer who read Zane Grey westerns and spoke in ridiculous anacoluthon — that syntactical incoherence for which he was famous. (Later, it was revealed that Eisenhower often spoke incoherently on purpose, in order to confuse the press. He thought it was funny. And he considered reporters to be a little stupid, a lesser breed.) [Time Mag. Lance Morrow, 2000-03-17]
• apotheosis │ aggrandizement, sublimation

✻ ✻ ✻

• -a nares │ nostrils
• -a morphology │ In the movie _Silence of the Lamb_ (1991), a moth's morphology is involved.
• -a taxonomy
• -a apoplectic │ After they've spent half an hour downloading Billy-Ray, hipsters everywhere are going to be apoplectic, and they'll blame the system. [suck.com satire. http://suck.com./daily/2000/03/24/nc_index4.html]
• -a photogenic │ often used on a girl

• minimalist │ the Scheme language is minimalist. │ (Scheme is a computer language) By the twisted nature of English, the meaning of the word “minimalist” isn't confined to something of a person. It is also a adjective, describing something relating to, or characteristic of minimalism. Thus, the phrase “the Scheme language is minimalist.” is ok. It need not to be verbose as “the Scheme language is designed by minimalists.” or “the Scheme language is designed with a philosophy of minimalism.” Both of the latter convey less, and less precision than the orginal, which in verbose version is: “the Scheme language has characteristics of a design that is minimalism.” Do not be delighted by the technicalities of this paragraph as to indicate that English language is worthy of deep learning. It is not. To know these details other than for the purpose of entertainment is in general a waste of time. Study formal logic, or linguistic instead. The English language, is so much a waste of human resource. One huge baggage that seduce and belabor and humbug.

-a autodidact │ me, not to be confused with autocrat or despot.

-a mesmerism │ hypnotism. Mesmerism came from Mesmer, a physician, who believed that he possess magnetic powers. │ American Heritage says: Word History: When the members of an audience sit mesmerized by a speaker, their reactions do not take the form of dancing, sleeping, or falling into convulsions. But if Franz Anton Mesmer were addressing the audience, such behavior could be expected. Mesmer, a visionary 18th-century physician, believed cures could be effected by having patients do things such as sit with their feet in a fountain of magnetized water while holding cables attached to magnetized trees. Mesmer then came to believe that magnetic powers resided in himself, and during highly fashionable curative sessions in Paris he caused his patients to have reactions ranging from sleeping or dancing to convulsions. These reactions were actually brought about by hypnotic powers that Mesmer was unaware he possessed. One of his pupils, named Puységur, then used the term mesmerism (first recorded in English in 1802) for Mesmer's practices. The related word mesmerize (first recorded in English in 1829), having shed its reference to the hypnotic doctor, lives on in the sense “to enthrall.”

-a arpeggio

-a ideologue

-a fundamentalist │ in religious contexts, it means people who believed that population are procreated by one man and one woman, and this woman is made up from a rib bone of that man, the value of Pi is 3, and many other holy tales.

physiognomy
phytotoxic

atavism
--
art
horology
cinematography
pugilism
stenography
monologue
--
literature

orthoepy
phraseology
Sensationalism

living things
pachyderm
araneid │ spider
cetacean
alga

Metaphysics Related

• hagiology
• Hegelianism
• monism
• pluralism
• idealism
• dualism
• atomism

social/political

• imperialism │ United Kingdom comes to mind.
• communalism
• paternalism
• classism

philosophy related

• solipsism │ ...Of even greater significance than the solipsism of students and the pusillanimity of teachers is the third trend, the sheer decline in the amount and quality of work expected in class... [from an essay opposing mass education]
• deconstructionism │ You don't know who Foucault was? He was the father of deconstructionism.
• theosophy
• unitarianism
• eudaemonism
• ecumenism
• sensualist
• tautology │ i say what i mean, i mean what i say, and tautologies are sometimes actually meaningful because of context.

studies

• vexillology │ study of flags. (i.e. their history, social significance etc. See also: Banners, Damsels, and Mores)
• ethology │ study of animal behavior, or study of human ethos. Go figure.
• ecology │ science of organism and their environments. Fashionable locution among good politicians.
• ethology
• telemetry
• ethnology
• ornithology
• phenomenology
• thanatology
• graphology

English, language

• euphuism │ Euphuism is an exaggeratedly fancy English style. It was invented by John Lyly for his novel Euphues (1578), and involves the use of abstruse classical allusion and figures of speech of every kind, particularly similes, extravagant metaphors, alliteration and assonance. Lyly's books were enormously popular and his style was widely imitated. Indeed, even Shakespeare (who sends it up in the utterances of Fluellen and Pistol in Henry V and the Sir-Topas swanking of Feste in Twelfth Night) was not immune to it. In later English literature, the most successful uses of it are Sir Thomas Urquhart's magnificently engorged, 17th-century translation of Rabelais, and the 19th-century, poetical extravagance of Swinburne and his imitators (such as James Elroy Flecker). It also underlies the dandified utterance of Restoration comedy, and is most satisfyingly mocked by Sheridan (for example in Mrs Malaprop's assaults on the language in The Rivals) and by Joyce (in the parodies of romantic literature in Ulysses). [source forgotten]
• archaism │ archaic word, idiom etc.
• -a anaphora │ e.g. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills” [Winston S. Churchill]
• anadiplosis
• logorrhea
• agglutinate
• alliteration
• simile
• figures of speech
• metaphor

oddball nouns

• amanuensis │ One who is employed to take dictation or to copy manuscript.
• proscenium │ The area of a modern theater that is located between the curtain and the orchestra
• apparatchiks │ A member of a Communist apparat.
• flan │ a desert
• troglodyte │ A member of a fabulous or prehistoric race of people that lived in caves, dens, or holes.
• ketch │ some kind of sailing boat

instruments

• clepsydra │ water clock
• stethoscope │ listens the heart
• theodolite │ surveyer's scope for measuring angles; similar to sextant

science jargons

• phenotype
• homeostasis

Pschological Oddities

• narcolepsy
• agnosia
• alexia
• psychotropic
• catatonia │ Stunned to the point of catatonia, she wanders alone in a garden.
• hypochondria │ convinced of being sick
• klismaphilia │ (enema love)
• coprolalia │ You need some manners. For a seemingly bright guy, you've got to realize no one is going to take you seriously if you act like the a village idiot with a bad case of copralalia. [email received]
• coprophilia │ love of feces — a love bizarre!
• homophobe │ aversion of homosexual
• xenophobic │ fearing foreign folks
• ochlophobia
• sigmoid │ The sigmoid colon is a looped section of the bowel just above the rectum. It is shaped somewhat like a question mark, hence its name.
• -a dyscalculia │ clinical inability to solve math problems
• -a echolalia │ autistic echoing of other people's words
• -a glossolalia
• -a melancholia
• -a memorabilia
• -a necrophilia
• -n triskelia │ the symbol found in Japanese or Korean cultures, kinda like the taichi yin-yan simpbol but three-fold.
• -n swastika │ an ancient symbol used as the emblem of Nazi Germany. 卐, 卍. │ With swastica in my eyes, i rule the world with my vision, with totality and categorical mien, forgiving no one.

science/medical related

• -a etiology │ SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome], an atypical pneumonia of unknown aetiology, was recognized at the end of February 2003. [The World Health Organization, 2003-03]
• oncology │ branch on tumors
• geriatrics │
• eugenics │ controlled breeding. Not to be confused with genetics. Eugenics is passe, stuff of old science fiction. Today we are onto nano-biology, clones, DNA tampering, and designer humans.
• orthodontics │ teeth correction, braces
• odontology │ dentist shit
• dentition │ The type, number, and arrangement of a set of teeth. (AHD)
• periodontics │ gum desease stuff
• ophthalmology │ eye stuff

palpus
epidermis

hemolymph │ “blood” of insects.

affidavit, animism, arraign, 
gastronomy, 
genealogy, geodesy, homeopathy, humanism, 
hyperventilate, 

hypothermia, ichthyology, multivalent

misology │ hatred of reason
misogyny │ hatred of women
mysanthropy │ hatred of human
pecuniary │ relating to money

Vocabulary Study: Sexual