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votes
What words do you recommend?
What are some words that you find particularly useful when writing and would recommend to others? How do you use them?
What are some words that you find particularly useful when writing and would recommend to others? How do you use them?
Conflate - I most often use this when cautioning about equating two concepts that are necessarily distinct (e.g. “let’s not conflate rights with privileges”). Because I’m a sucker for etymologies I looked it up and it’s essentially Latin for “with fire” as in to melt together.
Same root as conflagration, which is a dope-ass word for a high level fire spell.
I cast... CONFLAGRATION at the darkness!
I use this often at work, because I feel like this is one of the biggest sources of miscommunication: two people using the same words to conflate and argue about different things.
So soldering or welding are conflating metals.
But don't conflate soldering with welding, lest you are ready for the consequences!
Fortnight and Semiweekly - because biweekly bugs me by having two meanings, and you have to clarify what you mean instead of using one word that means what you want it to mean. Whenever I hear biweekly, I always have to ask the clarifying "do you mean twice a week or every two weeks?".
What do you do for biyearly?
Semiannualy I guess
That’s the easy one, it’s the every two year one that seems hard to work out!
Biennial?
Oops, @PepperJackson already wrote that :)
Semiannually and biennially work, if people know what biennial means
wonder - great for putting a question out there without assigning homework or putting someone on the spot. Starting with "I wonder if" is especially good if you doubt anyone has the answer to a question, but it's worth pondering. And maybe someone will know?
I’ve been fascinated at the similarities between “wonder” and “wander” since they are conceptually similar (i.e. to wonder is to let your mind wander). The etymologies appear separate (though both of Germanic origin). The PIE root for “wander” at least gives some indication of its base abstraction which also forms the word “wind” (as in to turn / winding around). Makes sense, since you try to “wrap your mind” around a concept by wondering/wandering about various facets of it.
PIE == proto-indo-European?
Yes, the PIE roots are often theorized because there wasn’t a written language when they were initially formed, so you’ll see notation with an asterisk (*) like:
for the root of both “wind” and “wander”.
I just said this and another word, but I use this a lot at work when reviewing work of my peers. Some of them are more receptive to criticism than others, but I find that using "I wonder if we should do it this way instead..." can soften feedback. I realize it can also be really patronizing, so I try to be careful with it.
plausible - useful as a noncommittal way of responding to someone else's speculation. Even if you don't think it's particularly likely that it will happen that way, you can say sure, it could happen!
I do see a hierarchy of likelihood via various terms:
Now, when you string these hierarchies together (“it’s certainly possible…”, “it’s definitely likely”) it becomes a layer too deep for me to want to explore further.
Oh I like plausible because it doesn’t have a probability attached to it. I find people tend to use the word likely for events they have no stats on (because they don’t or can’t exist), and I feel plausible is a much better work for what is a scientific deduction more than a statistical/experiential deduction.
MIL STD 882E (see p12) uses
Frequent, Probable, Occasional, Remote, and Improbable
The government loves talking about the field of estimative probability in prose. (both links are PDFs)
Thanks for the links. I had never seen the latter. Pretty interesting to get a window into the way risk is thought about in the intelligence community. Slightly different than the safety community and quite useful.
Is that really what it means? I'm not a native English speaker, but from what I picked up, that should be at least 75%. If you likely win a bet, only dare devils will bet against you. I use it synonymously with "probably". Is that wrong?
Yeah, you’re likely right. If I redefined my list, “probably” would be 50% and “likely” would be something higher (but with an upper bound of 90% to give enough of a degree of uncertainty) so maybe 75% is the right sweet spot.
I wrote my initial list at a bar so it was not going to be exhaustive, nor academic, but this is the type of topic that would make for a fun bar debate.
To fuel the fire, I wonder what other terms like “maybe” or “perhaps” imply in terms of probability?
A word that I like to use is nontrivial. It comes up enough at work that it's practically a meme when I say it in meetings.
e.g.
I love the typo.
But I also need to incorporate this into when my boss is like "hey, can we just x"? Me: Nope.
Ah, man, vicissitudes!
I feel like my writing has improved over the years not by using any words or phrases in particular, but by eliminating the use of awkward ones. If I had to name a few, though, I would say using words like inversely/conversely correctly can be helpful in making concise statements or arguments. Somewhat related to this, it's good to avoid common logical fallacies and cognitive biases (unless your narration or dialogue is leveraging these intentionally). Most of what I write is (unfortunately) academic, so maybe I am not the best person to be giving advice :b
Actually, a great approach to academic writing is through elimination of awkward words and phrases or, more generally, elimination of all but the minimal elements needed to illustrate your ideas. Strunk and White would give you a nod of approval.
In college, my papers were all fluff and frill. I think it is easy to err on the side of adornment when you are BSing your way through an essay. On the other side, having read such a large volume of academic writing, that fluff stands out too much. And if I am being honest, that is one thing that makes it hard for me to get through the works of some influential scholars.
They likely would. I have soured on them a bit, though. Their advice about reducing verbiage is sound, but they also make some other confounding claims about grammar @_@
This bugs me so much since it happened: literally now means both literally and figuratively. They’ve updated dictionaries to reflect that, as usage makes the définition. What’s the point of a word that means the thing AND its opposite? It loses all meaning.
Minor gripe: literally does not mean figuratively. Literally is sometimes used figuratively.
When people use literally to mean figuratively, all they're doing is using hyperbole, lots of words rely on context to distinguish between meaning, this isn't a weird thing for english
Yeah, whatever oversight committee sanctioned that should have tabled it and moved on.
Not exactly useful, but widdershins for anti-clockwise.
I am also a fan of antiwiddershins for clockwise.
Here on Roundworld, "deosil" used to be the pair of widdershins, but I'm partial to Discworld's "turnwise".
I just got verbally berated by my SO for using "anticlockwise" (that is, "THIS IS A MURICAN HOUSEHOLD, WE SAY COUNTERCLOCKWISE... WE DIDN'T GET TO THE MOON USING METRIC!")
So now I have yet another card to throw at his jugular! BWAHAHAHAHA!
Perhaps he needs to be reminded of the law 😄 (although I find this link a bit more helpful to seeing metric around yourself). And NIST is trying to get more people to try metric.
Your problem is that this "the law" is not actually a thing. I grew up seeing the retrospect failures in California, where we'd get billboards stating distances in km and miles.
I am not sure what the governance declarations were back in the day, but I was told (and haven't confirmed, but it seems to check out) that Canada and the US opted to swap to metric for distances at some point in the late 70s/early 80s. But the US was a... as kinda today, a chickenshit and preferred bullshit over fact.
So, there's my honest thoughts on that.
Oh yeah, the chances of the US populace getting anything close to metric (ie even UK/Canada mixes) is less likely than Star Trek-esque faster than light travel happening. I would just have fun trading back that America has a law preferring metric and so anticlockwise is allowed.
It's a subject that has some fun (to me) trivia I like to share; serious discussion of the common use of the SI system in the US isn't something I'd bother with either. Hope you have a good rest of your weekend!
Dang, sorry I stated "your problem is..."
Yeah, I'm a bit late checking back in, life's been crazy.
I wanted to apologize for coming across as accusatory or offensive, if you took it that way. I appreciate your chipper response as well!
The thing is, I actually do engage in serious discussion in bringing the SI to the US, but yeah... I'm often shut down. I also work in power generation that utilizes fossil fuels, so that's yet another often offensive topic I often attempt to engage in with others in order to explain and facilitate understanding, instead of just listening to what the politicians say.
All good!
I haven't been able to write anything but a novel to expand on those 2 words so I'll let them sit and, like the Elcor of Mass Effect add [earnestly].
You probably already know this but I find it really neat that deep geothermal power generation uses a lot of technology that was refined through fracking. Fossil fuel technology is key to lots of research but to be so important to an emerging renewable energy option feels surprising to me.
Eschew obfuscation.
porte-cochère, which is basically the awning you drive under at the front of a lot of commercial buildings. Bunch of my friends work in hotels and when I learned this word I couldn't believe I never had a name for such a common thing before. It's kind of pronounced like "puert-uh-cuh-shay".
As a francophone, it's pronounced "port-co-chair"
I know people never agree on these things since they can be regional, but as an American, I'd like to suggest "POR-tuh co-SHARE".
You can't just say "port" because us lazy Americans end words like this with a glottal stop rather than actually pronouncing the "t" at the end. Also, "chere" in French sounds more like "share" in English. Finally, emphasis was added using upper case to de-emphasize the "tuh" and because words like "co-chair" or "copilot" always have emphasis on the "co" which would be wrong here.
I had no idea. TBH we were all just graduated resort workers at the time so I think we just assumed our manager was pronouncing it correctly. Most of our friend group were also Spanish speakers so maybe puerta just snuck in there since the front door of the hotel is generally right beneath the porte-cochère.
Jesus Christ.
Proponent (noun): a person who advocates a theory, proposal, or course of action.
I use it when I want to sound like one of those corporate lobbyists dressed in a three-piece suit.
Specious
I try not to overuse words and phrases in my writing, as I have a bad habit of unconsciously repeating words too close together. When I go back to edit my work, it annoys me no end to I see that I've used the same descriptor three times in three paragraphs.
Since I'm writing a fantasy story now, the words manifest and affinity keep popping up, and I have to be aware of my use of them.
I saw this thread the other day and couldn't think of a word, at the time. But one just came to mind:
arch-
No, not the "typically curved structural member spanning an opening", but rather, the prefix most often encountered in words like 'archenemy' or 'archrival' - essentially a synonym for 'chief' or 'principal'. The etymology of 'arch' is the ancient Greek word 'arkhein' which meant 'to be the first', from which we get the Greek word 'archon', meaning commander, ruler, or chief (a word which has a somewhat archaic use in English as well). 'Archaic' also derives from 'arkhein' along with other words communicating a sense of extreme age, like 'archaeology'. And finally, returning to the sense of 'ruler', 'arch' can also serve as a suffix for words like patriarch, anarchy, monarchy, etc.
But moreover, I've found the 'arch-' prefix, in particular, to be an elegant yet flexible addition to regular speech. I just described Twinkies to my girlfriend as the "arch-snack food". The word is a perfect blend of descriptiveness and semi-ironic erudition. It's easy to remember, easy for anyone to understand, and it's usually at least worthy of an inward chuckle.
Charateristically, I don't know it just sounds cool and characteristic.
I had a colleague who often used the word perseverate, and I like it! I'm prone to linger over things I should move past, and it's nice to have a word for it.
Bespoke - I used to avoid this word because it just seemed too "uppity" to me. At my job, though, we make highly customized software for a handful of customers, so I've grown to rely on it to describe our products.
imagine - useful when speculating about the future or anything else you know little about. Starting off with "I imagine that" is great for not sounding like a know-it-all and not pushing your opinion on others. Crystal balls are hard to come by, but anyone can imagine things!
Such a broad question. I sometimes get addicted to a word. I have been using "perhaps" way too much in the past few months. It makes me feel like I'm Sherlock Holmes, calmly making statements. I don't know if I recommend it, but it is very addictive. It is a good way to communicate an alternative while sounding neither aggressive nor submissive. At least that is how I perceive it.
When expressing both sides of a thought in business correspondence, I enjoy using a good semicolon however.
It clears the way for a contrary thought; however, the latter thought is often related to the former thought.
However, using a comma can also start a sentence nicely on its own.
A second favorite is using former / latter when presenting options.
Pusillanimous - one of those $5 words which, once you have it, will end up applying way more than you expected. It has an edge, too. Be careful with the application of it, because there is a risk of narrowing your own view if you apply it too fast/too broadly, and you can potentially open yourself up to resentment. It requires a degree of experience, because the definition relies on certain feelings having been evoked, and what other people feel is not necessarily what you will feel when you engage with the same person. It's gotta get deployed after engagement/observation, not before.
Multifaceted - things are rarely only what they appear to be and this word is a good one for getting across complexity without additional connotation.
Inconsequential - Sometimes things don't matter. This word helps to say that without touching phrases that make folks feel it within, at least that's been my consistent experience with it.
Excessive - you might be surprised what you can end up getting from folks if you can make this word apply to unconventional things.
Epistemic - sometimes it matters how someone knows things. Method is important and when you need to talk about method with respect to thinking through stuff, give this one a shot.
"Grapholect" is an interesting word. Just as dialect refers to a spoken variant of a language, grapholect refers to a written variant. I like this word because it emphasizes the importance of reading and writing to intellectual life. Walter Ong's book, “Orality and Literacy”, says that oral dialects are typically comprised of a few thousand words, while “the grapholect known as standard English" has over 1.5 million words.
What a great word! I need something like this for mathematical or other symbolic notations. I was shocked when I learned that things like circuit diagram symbols have regional differences.
I use necessary/sufficient a lot, they're nice for classifying relations between things
"Ephemeral" is one of my favorites. It's opposite of permanent. If something will last only a short time, you could describe it as "ephemeral." One characteristic of the word that occurs to me as I write this is that it's only useful if the expectation about the thing being described is that it would not be ephemeral. For example, it wouldn't be useful to describe a meal or a drink as "ephemeral" since they all are.