Unique vocabulary

I do hope that the use of the word emolument doesn’t have anything to do with your current employment or unemployment status…

I had a middle school teacher who prided himself on using unusual words on the regular. Mind you, he wasn’t even a language or English instructor. He often said that language was his palette and words, the paint. His deal was that every time he used a word you didn’t know, you were allowed to raise your hand for clarification.

Seemed the entire class was raising their collective hands every 5 minutes. It was possibly the most unproductive, amorphous class I ever had. But it definitely created a amaranthine memory for me.

This morning I fear my “in my head” vocab would “make a sailor blush”.

/giphy inarticulate

I don’t use unique words really. I have no need for them.

I feel kinda stupid reading this thread, even though I’m smart in other ways.

Ever since I found it in the dictionary, tintinabulation was one of my favorite “uncommon” words. It means “the sound of ringing bells” or “the ringing of bells”. That was truly a moment of serendipity for me (finding something valuable without looking for it).

While I am familiar with long, uncommon vocabulary words, I don’t tend to use them often enough. I guess I don’t feel the need to sound eloquent or gaudy when I can express myself just as well with common language.

I found my all time favorite word when I was first learning about computers.

Dongle.

A building I worked in daily for years had one of those elevators with a TV screen for news and features. I think the building had about 50 floors, so a fair number of people were “enjoying” the programming each day.

Each day, during elevators ride, some valiant content specialist for the Captivate Network (the company providing elevator content - I think that was their name) would attempt to teach the thousands of us either some monstrous English word or some series of foreign words.

It became a humorous tradition in the building that during “morning coffee and muffin elevator rides”, when the “help-the-building-captives-attain-some-culture” screens came up, people in the elevators would attempt to mispronounce and misuse our “daily arcane educational content” in amusing ways.

(It was only a tradition for rides between about 6am and 7:30am, started by various frustrated banking and legal employees - after 7:30am the odds of having clients and visitors in the elevators were much higher.)

Sometimes on the Captivate screen, an attempt would be made to teach us a common one-word concept - “twelve”, for instance - in 4-5 different languages. Or the elevator screen would attempt to teach us, say, 4-5 simple words in a single language. The “big European high-school and college languages”, such as Spanish, French, and German, seemed rarely included. Chinese seemed a frequent option, and usually a less-popular-in-school European language such as Portuguese or Finnish, for instance, and a selection of other languages spread out over the various continents. One of the selected languages was often either Farsi, Arabic, or Hindi (many oilfield services companies in the building). Hebrew was seemingly never offered as a choice - perhaps because in Israel, English is commonplace? Or Israel doesn’t have many oil wells?

Curiously, all the languages selected were at least majority languages on at least a national/governmental level. You never saw, for instance, a choice of Navajo, or any other aboriginal, tribal, or minority population language.

People in the elevator used to speculate that the content providers were contracted by the building owners to juice the building workers to go forth and take our corporate masters out to new frontiers of business and influence. So why waste time on languages whose native speakers were not wealthy or did not offer good business opportunities? Or languages in countries where almost everyone one might do international business with already spoke fluent English?

On the mornings when the elevator screen showed several words in a single foreign language, the riders would start speculating that this was a secret message in code indicating some significant hint about an international currency market tick.

In one law office the riders seemed to keep count of the words in Chinese, and someone had made a spreadsheet trying to figure out what the total Chinese “elevator vocabulary” was and how long it would take to be able to speak or read the Chinese language by learning it in an elevator.

A fair # of the riders knew a fair # of the English words. If the day’s English word was quite commonly know, instead of making a joke of abusing the day’s word, the elevator riders would start to mock the content programmer for not even trying.

I can’t remember now any specific word I saw during those rides, and if we didn’t already know the “elevator word of the day”, i doubt any of us retained anything - except, possibly, for one group of paralegals - who would conspicuously make notes, earnestly discuss the word choice in mock seriousness, and who claimed the words were a secret communication device that would eventually enable the paralegals to capture all the licensed lawyers, lock the lawyers into dungeons, and free the world from the tyranny, expense, and misery caused by and for lawyers.

Some lawyers in the elevators during these rides would beg the paralegals to please hurry up with the plot, since living in a dungeon for an eternity seemed preferable to reading yet another mind-numbing brief.

Making sport of the “learn your words now” content in the elevator became such a tradition that people would complain when the standard quick news and sports content was on the elevator screen. It was a fun bonding thing - an alternative to just being brain-dead and numbly resentful of consciousness in the early corporate morning. I heard rumors that a few couples had first met and spoken to each other during these elevator rides.

Rudimentary overview of medical terminology: A bunch of Greek & Latin word parts strung together.

Esophagogastroduodenoscopy

Esophag-o means esophagus
Gastr-o means stomach
Duoden-o means duodenum
Scopy means examination

Therefore, Esophagogastroduodenoscopy is examination of the esophagus, stomach, and duodenum.
(Also known as EGD )