Trying to think of a word, similar to "adage" or "a common saying." I've been using Thesaurus.com and other sites to find the word I'm looking for, and I can't find it. I've been through at least 20 or 30 different synonyms, and none of them sound right. They all sound too... too formal. I think the word I'm looking for is more colloquial, maybe ( Read more... )

Whale tale for sale: Pale hale female quail email trail in braille nails Gail of Vale Dale for jail. Bail: shale pail of snail kale scales ( Read more... )

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I do have an extensive vocabulary, but sometimes in Scrabble and Words of Wonder I just make guesses. Like "Oh, this sounds like a word," or "Oh, I wonder if this is a wor- IT IS!?!? o_O" or else I just string letters together on Words of Wonder until they start rocking back and forth to indicate I have discovered, randomly, a real word. Today's ( Read more... )

Robert Anton Wilson came up with a better word for rigid belief than what "dogmatic" has become: "modeltheism." (IE, worshiping one's model of the universe to such a degree that one refuses to ever let it change, therefore rejecting any new data that might make it need to change ( Read more... )

"Doing the math we can conclude it will take 1.7 x 10^17 years for our sun to generate the same amount of energy as a cubic light year of cheese."LOL, "cubic light year of cheese" keeps giving me the giggle fits. I think this is going to go down in history as one of my favorite phrases, second only to something I came up with in a short story: "She ( Read more... )

I hate it when non-human creatures that eat humans are referred to as "cannibals." The Wikipedia entry for Rakshasa makes this mistake, and so does the Buffy Wiki's entry for the "Spider Monsters" of Angel season 4. The word "cannibal" means they eat their own species; a non-human creature that eats humans but does not eat their own kind is NOT a ( Read more... )

I learned a new word today: Psychometry. It is "the alleged art or faculty of divining facts concerning an object or a person associated with it, by contact with or proximity to the object." I have a character in the abandoned "Foreign Influence" novel that has this power. The character, an Ah'Koi Bahnis named Votahk, will probably be used in my ( Read more... )

Originally posted by janetmiles at (Religion) Learned a new word
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Boustrophedon is a fucking awesome word. I learned it reading "Wizard of Mars" by Diane Duane. Definition here ( Read more... )