Hampton Stevens, subbing for Ta-Nehisi Coates, asks readers to name their five favorite words. OK then. In no order, I give you:
- Slathered - Thanks to the way Cormac McCarthy used it in "Blood Meridian".
- Astringent. It's nearly onomatopoetic - except it sounds like it is, not like the noise it makes.
- Interstitial. Spaces between the big things. I like that.
- Sylvan. Who among us does not like a tree?
- Flense. What it describes is gruesome. But it sounds lovely.
I'm all about the S and the L.
It would be interesting to do a word-frequency search through one’s archives and see what words (that are not stop words or proper nouns) one uses the most.
oh great. now i’m going to spend all afternoon trying to see if there’s a way to do a word frequency query in MySql…
Dunno about MySql, I ususally use shell scripts for that kind of thing.
detritus
amphigory
adamant
Ooh, “adamant” is a nice one.
and i like ‘detritus’
abrogate
concuspient
“orthogonally” has something to be said for it.
Also “polymath”.
“orthogonally” has something to be said for it.
a favorite of programming types everywhere.
does anyone else use it?
i also like ‘ostensibly’
i’m also very fond of ‘fucking’.
it brings a certain spice to sentences which would otherwise be pretty fucking bland.
Absofuckinglutely.