
New York Times 50 Most Challenging Words - mmaunder
http://www.currentlyobsessed.com/2010/06/15/new-york-times-50-most-challenging-words-defined-and-used/
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grellas
About a month ago, there was a post on HN of "unusual and amusing English
words" (<http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/unuwords.htm>), which drew
the astute comment from pg that the "best sort of obscure words are ones that
are obscure because they're old or highly specialized, not because someone
made them up and they never really became part of the spoken language"
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1355056>).

Though educated people will tend to know a good number of the words on the
list posted here, I _like_ this list because it generally sets forth old
English standbys that tend to mark the vocabulary of the speaker as being
above the average or the mundane while not being pretentious or artificially
fanciful.

There are many similar words: gossamer, latitudinarian, exegete, perforce,
resplendent, and on and on.

The key to such words, and to their strength, lies in the fact that they are
not used day-by-day by most people, that they often have classical hooks, and
that their use in modern forms of expression adds variety and interest
precisely because they come at the reader from an unusual angle (basically,
pg's point as made above). One can differ about this or that word, of course,
but the broader point is that lists of this type are helpful and fun to
review.

~~~
jokermatt999
> or highly specialized

This is what makes me love a word. When I can find a word that just perfectly
and succinctly expresses what I'm trying to communicate, I love it. I don't
use large or obscure words to show off; I use them because I enjoy having
exactly the right word to say what I mean.

~~~
presidentender
Thus your working vocabulary lacks orthogonality, but compensates with
brevity.

~~~
daeken
I know you were making a joke (I think? I laughed, at least), but I wouldn't
say that he's compensating with brevity; rather, he has depth and not (much)
breadth.

~~~
presidentender
That man can use few words but they are good words and so we can know what
they all mean. If we have to use words that are not as good we have to say
them more, but we do not need to know as many words.

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JoachimSchipper
I am not a native speaker, but I thought some definitions were questionable.

\- internecine has a strong connotation of "amongst themselves", which is
borne out by the example but not in the definition; \- the definition of
Kristallnacht is useless if you don't know what it's referring to, and you
will likely know the term if you _do_ know what it is referring to. A link to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht> or "the prelude to the holocaust"
would be better; \- similarly, I think
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism#Theology> (which highlights the
split in a powerful-but-not-omnipotent good force and an also powerful evil
force) should be linked.

I stopped trying to verify things at this point; no doubt a native speaker can
improve on this list.

~~~
davidw
I am a native speaker, and wanted to write the same thing about 'internecine'.
Indeed, wordnet says:

    
    
        adj 1: (of conflict) within a group or organization
          "an internecine feud among proxy holders"
    

Manichean, as I understand it, refers more to a very strong binary view of
things as either good or bad. For instance, from The Economist:

"President George Bush's Manichean worldview—“you are either with us or
against us”—is now echoed in Bangkok ..."

They did the same thing with 'sclerotic', too by describing it in terms of the
body, but not underlining how often it's used for things like organizations.

~~~
doty
It's interesting; for internecine that's what I had always used as the
definition as well. However, the OED only lists two definitions:

1\. orig. Deadly, destructive, characterized by great slaughter. internecine
war, war for the sake of slaughter, war of extermination, war to the death.

2\. esp. (In modern use.) Mutually destructive, aiming at the slaughter or
destruction of each other.

And a non-obvious etymology:

[ad. L. internecn-us murderous, destructive, f. internecium slaughter,
destruction, f. internecre: see next. App. first used as a rendering of L.
internecnum bellum, in Butler's Hudibras (to which also is due the
unetymological pronunciation, instead of interncine). On this authority
entered by Johnson in his Dictionary, with an incorrect explanation, due to
association with words like interchange, intercommunion, etc. in which inter-
has the force of ‘mutual’, ‘each other’. From J. the word has come into later
dictionaries and 19th c. use, generally in the Johnsonian sense.]

(And 'baldenfreud' is a bit out of place on a list like this; a neologism if
I've ever heard one.)

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jackfoxy
Including a neologism coined by one of their columnists as #6 is beneath the
dignity of the rest of the list. It hasn't made it to Google "define". The top
hits when Googleing it all refer to Maureen Dowd "inventing" it, so you can't
really say it has caught on.

I imagine from the context it was used it should not have really stumped that
many readers, who would have been familiar with "schadenfreude", and so have
gotten the joke.

~~~
tedunangst
As the Times said, "As you no doubt realized, the entry with the highest rate
of look-ups per use isn't really a word at all. Baldenfreude is a nonce word
-- a one-time coinage, in this case Maureen Dowd’s fanciful twist on
schadenfreude.", so your ire seems a little misdirected.

~~~
jackfoxy
Busted.

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tmountain
Fun list of words, but a few seem out of place. Namely: austerity, hubris,
overhaul, ubiquitous, and hegemony, all of which seem fairly common. That
being said, there are tons of words on this list that I'm unfamiliar with, and
I look forward to digging into it more when I have time.

~~~
warfangle
I think the reason they listed Overhaul is they were going with the second
definition:

"to come from behind and pass them"

I have never seen the word used this way...

~~~
drats
I haven't seen it used like that either. I can't imagine an instance where it
would be better than "overtake".

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Qz
_2\. Profligacy: recklessly wasteful; wildly extravagant, profligate behavior;
Anderson’s profligacy cost him his job and its better you tighten up your belt
before you go the same way.

5\. Profligate: using money, resources, etc., in a way that wastes them; The
firm’s profligate spending only hastened its downfall._

List fail.

~~~
danh
I thought that was an attempt at being funny, in a "See: recursion" kind of
way.

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camiller
I agree with tmountain, I recognized a lot of the words from Freshman
vocabulary in high school ... 19 years ago.

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CountHackulus
As a native French speaker, I'm quite amused that several of these words are
either French or have a basis in French. Seems that English has appropriated
many words from other languages.

~~~
gabrielroth
Some of them ('Crèches,' for example) are from French, but perhaps you're
thinking of others (e.g. 'nascent') that come to both English and French from
Latin.

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sliverstorm
I never knew the modern definition of sanguine. How funny, it kind of did an
about-face!

Reminds me of 'cleave apart' and 'cleave together'

~~~
telemachos
What non-modern definition are you thinking of?

Online dictionaries suggest that the meaning of "cheerful" or "optimistic"
goes straight back to the theory of humors. E.g., from Dictionary.com:

 _3\. (in old physiology) having blood as the predominating humor and
consequently being ruddy-faced, cheerful, etc._

Merriam-Webster.com has something similar. Dead tree dictionaries in my house,
ditto.

(Are you maybe thinking of the quasi-sound-alike 'sang-froid' => "calmness,
composure; coolness of mind"?)

~~~
sliverstorm
2 a : consisting of or relating to blood b : bloodthirsty, sanguinary

It's true cheerful isn't exactly a direct opposite, but 2b sure isn't
positive.

~~~
telemachos
I was completely unaware of 2b. Thanks. (It sounds vaguely Shakespearean in
that sense.)

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waterlesscloud
What's amusing is not only knowing the words, but being able to make a good
guess about their most frequent contexts. I bet "Comity" is almost always used
in a story about the U.S. Senate, for example.

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commieneko
A better title for this would be "50 somewhat uncommon, but not particularly
challenging words some of our readers had to look up using our online word
definition utility."

~~~
JacobAldridge
Sure, but then it wouldn't have fit into the character limit of the title
field on the HN submit page, which I'm sure was a key factor for the NY Times
/ Currently Obsessed.

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techiferous
Note that egregious has negative connotations.

