User:Thefollyof

a little bit about me & my linguistic profile

 * born and raised in the southern U.S.; my speech is affected by this, but the only way it comes across in writing is through my overuse of "y'all"
 * my accent is more comparable to a GenAm accent than rural Southern accents, but I do have a few of the Southern pronounciation features (especially from Texan English; a few from Appalachian English)

a noncomprehensive list of words I really enjoy

 * antepenultimate
 * definition
 * two before the last, i.e., the one immediately before the penultimate, in a series
 * so silly! five syllables for something that could be summed up as "third-to-last"
 * somebody had too much fun learning English prefixes and let the power get to their head. I'm imagining a humanities equivalent of a mad scientist laughing maniacally to themself with books all around them opened to cardinal number etymological roots
 * just learned that this word (and the others like it) is basically stolen from Latin so, as per uzhje, the Latin speakers went ham on variants


 * eschatological
 * definition
 * pertaining to eschatology
 * definition of eschatology
 * (countable) a system of doctrines concerning final matters, such as death
 * (uncountable) the study of the end times—the end of the world, notably in Christian and Islamic theology, the second coming of Christ, the Apocalypse or the Last Judgment
 * I'm going to start calling nihilism-fueled existential crises "eschatological rumination" to give my panic a Classical Greek philosophical air


 * parenthetical (specifically the noun)
 * definition
 * a word or phrase within parentheses.
 * (screenwriting) a descriptor or modifier enclosed within parentheses and put, indented, in a line of dialogue to describe how it should be acted or directed onscreen
 * a word for something I use so frequently and want to reference so frequently yet only found the language for recently
 * should be more widely used


 * passé
 * definition
 * (colloquial) dated; out of style; old-fashioned
 * past one's prime; worn; faded.
 * like cheugy but less cheugy
 * normally, I'm not too big of a fan of loanwords from French, but this one just rolls off the tongue so well
 * I also do love a good diacritical character in English


 * vestige
 * definition
 * a mark left on the earth by a foot
 * (by extension) a faint mark or visible sign left by something which is lost, or has perished, or is no longer present
 * (biology) a vestigial organ; a non-functional organ or body part that was once functional in an evolutionary ancestor
 * (television, radio) the remaining portion of a partially suppressed sideband
 * vaguely reminiscent of the feeling of nostalgia, but only with other humans, not memories/the past broadly
 * I love thinking about biological vestiges as little "hey, you! I was here! and now you are too! ain't that neat?" messages from evolutionary ancestors. it reassures me a bit, how even when we're long gone and no one is there to remember you, or anyone you knew, or anyone who knew them, or your species as a whole, since the effects of our lives on the universe cannot be undone, we're not truly forgotten (at least not for a virtually infinite sum of time, but I can't comprehend infinity, so I'm going to stick to my "we increase the entropy of the universe and absorb and exert energy, so therefore, however small, the memory of humanity will never be lost" philosophy)


 * wiles
 * definition
 * a trick or stratagem practiced for ensnaring or deception; a sly, insidious artifice
 * the only time I have ever seen this word used is in describing flirtation or seduction of some sort and I find that hilarious
 * it sort-of implies that the act of beguiling someone is the epitome of insidiousness