Although I like the words "piteously" and "smote" quite a lot, my favorite word has to be "defenestrate."
I also have an obsession with trying to bring back words and phrases that were once common and now aren't so common (or words that I simply like and think should be used more frequently).
"Look-see," "swell," and "keen" are ones I try to incorporate into my daily language patterns as much as possible. Dr. Nate is not allowed to have a "look" at the TiVo to see why the channels aren't changing properly. He is allowed to have a "look-see" at it, however.
I focus my efforts on the adjective forms of keen and swell, and not the noun and verb forms even though the noun and verb forms of "keen" are also interesting. It's just don't usually have cause to bring up lamentations for the dead in daily conversation.
I've been considering the word "hep" lately; it could be primed for a comeback.
4 comments:
I have been fooled a couple of times lately by a form of the word hone, used in a sports column analogy.
Thus:
"We think that the league should have spent some more timing honing this particular cannon before aiming and firing it at any of the 32 member franchises."
Well, I was merrily typing up a little note to the blogger to explain that they'd misused honing, when I thought I'd better look it up.
Turns out I was wr-wr-wr- ... not correct.
As for words to resurrect, consider boffo, which can be used in conjunction with hep.
I actually know what "defenestrate" means, but I've never had an occasion to use it naturally in a sentence. The closest I've come is, "Hey, do you know there's a word that means to throw someone out a window?"
Jeff,
Boffo is awesome! One I hadn't considered, but much better than "hep"
Tim,
I've only ever used "defenestrate" when I wanted to describe doing bodily harm to someone. As in, "I'd really like to defenestrate her."
Or, you could also go with changing the phrase to "That's like defenestrating the baby with the bathwater."
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