I found way over 20 obscure words on this topic, so I’ve broken them up into two groups: One group consists of words directly relating to literature – words like “aureate” which means “relating to poetic and flowery words”. I’ll describe and post those some other time.
The second more straight-forward group are words about words – words like synonym; a word having the same meaning as another, or homonym; a word that sounds like another word but has a different meaning. You probably know both these words, but if you’re like me, you confuse the two and lose marks in all your English tests. Anyway, the list of ten words here are words that you probably don’t know and will never need to know.
Disclaimer: Reading this will not improve your English grades. (If you’re reading this when you should be doing your homework, then shame on you.)
1. Cohyponym: There are lots of “words about words” that are “nyms”, like synonym and homonym. There’s paranym, which means the same as euphemism, but just to confuse everyone there’s also a paronym, which is a homonym wannabe. An example of two paronyms is: deprecate and depreciate. This is truly confusing, because these paronyms are also synonym wannabes.
Then there’s a meronym, which is a word that refers to something that’s part of something else. Thus a claw is meronym in respect of a lion. Related to this is a hyponym, which is more particular. It refers to a logical grouping that’s part of some more general grouping. Think: ocelot – felidae (cat family) – mammal – animal – lifeform. Each word is a hyponym of the one that follows it, and just to complicate matters each word is a hypernym of the one that precedes it. Hyponym and hypernym are sort of opposite in this way. The hyponym goes from the particular to the general group, whereas the hypernym goes from the general group to the particular.
Finally this brings us to the cohyponym. Cohyponyms are sibling hyponyms. For example: ocelot and puma are both hyponyms of felidae.
2. Logastellus: It’s unlikely I know, but if you really have foresaken your English homework to read this blog posting, then maybe you’re a logastellus; a person whose love of words is exceeds their knowledge of words. What could be more natural for logastelli than to defer their homework in favor of exposing themselves to new and exciting words, in the hope of leaping the crevasse between their aspirations and their knowledge.
There is a plethora of words for people who are obsessed with words. There’s verbivore, which has the sense of someone devouring words. There’s the logomaniac, who’s just mad about words. There’s the verbolatrist or grammatolatrist or epeolatrist, all of whom truly worship words. There’s the hellomaniac who is obsessed with foreign or unusual words and there’s the appalling lexiphanicist, who shows off by the use of an extensive vocabulary. Be warned. If you’re a logastellus, you could turn into any one of these word-crazy obsessives.
3. Onomatophobia: There are far fewer words for those who dislike words than for thsoe who like them. There’s the cringing verbophobe who lives in fear of words and that’s just about it in terms of general nouns. However, if you have verbophobia, there are varieties of it. There’s penphobia or scriptophobia both of which are the morbid fear of writing or of the written word. There’s maledictaphobia; the fear of saying bad words, which for most people means swear words, although what constitutes a “bad word” is clearly a subjective thing. Finally there’s onomataphobia; the fear of hearing a certain word. In most contexts this is likely to pertain to fear of swear words, but not always. An alternative example of onomatophobia was provided by the episode in the British comedy series, Fawlty Towers, where a family of Germans arrive at the hotel and Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) becomes obsessed with not talking about “the war.”
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
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