User:Soap/rightside

Favorite words

This showcases my favorite words ... many are related to biology, a field I've never worked in, but which has always interested me. Some are video game references. Words that I have listed elsewhere (triplets, made-up words, etc) are not duplicated here.

Non-English (not much right now):

Least favorite words (with explanations) Although Wiktionary is a descriptivist dictionary, in my own private writing, I follow prescriptivist rules. Most of the words I dislike are words which have recently evolved a weaker, broader sense that has driven out an earlier more specific sense
 * not an acronym
 * onomatopoeia way too many syllables and not fun to type
 * virtually and practically, when used to mean "almost"
 * unironically seems to just mean "sincerely"

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EXPLANATIONS
 * 1) elemental either used in its fantasy sense or where it overlaps with "elementary" ... from a cartoon where i misread "elementary spells" as "elemental spells", which I had learned from a video game. The same game also introduced me to the term partisan as the name of a weapon, and to the concept of the sleep flower.
 * 2) phone shower (a variant of telephone shower) is the hardest to explain ... phone and shower are comforting words to me, but it's also a reminder of how I misread something in a video game once and thought that there was a booth that combined the functions of a payphone and a shower.
 * 3) love heart Im not sure what drew me to this word. But I recently discovered that i'd used it to describe the ❤️ emoji when i was 8 years old(!), so perhaps it was in my subconscious all this time.
 * 4) my love of chrysalis is difficult to explain, as one might think i'd prefer the nearly synonymous pupa and cocoon, which have the sound symbolism i like better. this shows that i dont even understand my own attachments to words.  i just found about chrysalism this morning, which might be even more beautiful to me than the more common chrysalis.  But I love them both.