Hot take: Words you learned from reading

What are some of your favorite words you learned while reading?

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I'm learning old definitions for words that have since changed their meaning.

Apparently a "bully" used to mean a pimp!

And a "snob" used to be a vulgar person with no claim to gentility!

I've no idea in both cases how we got from there to here. Although .... in the latter case it seems like it was originally applied to townsfolk, the merchant class bourgeoisie type who had the temerity to think they were as good as the nobility and got all obsessed with the class and social status they craved.

Thanks to H.P Lovecraft I've learned:
eldritch
squamous
cyclopean
batrachian

>2 Cecrow: Boy that's certainly fun!

So, not my favorite, but a recent example, is that I learned that there's a specific name for a kind of bag that I fancy the look of, and that it is called a Gladstone bag, thanks to recently reading The Quick.

grimoire

scrofula

Look, Spot. Oh, look, look Spot. Look and see. Oh, see.

Tlacuache

>7 suitable1: **big grin**

>8 Lyndatrue: woohoo!!

Do crosswords count? Because I swear I learn at least one new word every day with the NYT one. Most recently standout: gapeseed.

otiose

>7 suitable1: I have wondered how many children never became readers because they had to read those wretched books.

>7 suitable1:, that's pretty advanced. I still remember my first one, word for word.

Sam. Sit Sam. Sam sits. (the end. Sam was a dog, btw. Definitely no comma in that second bit.)

>11 Taphophile13: Those books weren't as wretched as the ones we had to read in high school-Adam Bede, Ethan Frome, Silas Marner. Nothing wrong with them, but they just didn't appeal to my high school self. Glad I persevered and overcame the trauma of having to read them!

>13 perennialreader: Oh they were just awful. Although I found a good use for Silas Marner: instant drug-free sleep.

Gumption. Thanks, Margaret Mitchell.

trumpery

Its first definition in my Merriam-Webster’s immediately made it a highlight.

From What’s Bred in the Bone, published 1985, by Canadian Robertson Davies.

Numinous - indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity. C. S. Lewis, THE PROBLEM OF PAIN

Moxie.

There are a bunch in Huxley's The Devils of Loudun of which bromidrosis lingers.

I love callipygian: of, pertaining to, or having well-shaped or finely developed buttocks. Don't recall where I found it.

In the OED, I stumbled across guddle: To catch (fish) with the hands, by groping under the stones or banks of a stream.

I also had a chance encounter in the OED with squoyle, and one of my favourite definitions: Squoyle, in the New Forest, properly signifies a short stick loaded at one end with lead and is distinguished from a 'snog' which is only weighted with wood.

Highly actionable information, as they say.

calumny

>19 librorumamans: I also learned “callipygian” from a book, and fairly recently, but also can’t remember which one. Curious, I tried searching the web for a clue. That failed but I did learn the following, which I pass on in the interest of higher learning:
1) Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow presents us with “callipygian rondure”. I think that sounds rather fine.
2) Avery Brewing Company once offered a beer called Callipygian Barrel Aged Stout. The alcohol-by-volume content was 17.4%. Callipygian packed a wallop!

I’ve not read Gravity’s Rainbow and probably would need a fair amount of Callipyian Barrel Aged Stout to tackle it. Sadly, though, that brew has been “retired.”

I don't know if it will count. But it is been my favorite word ever since. I saw it reading a barbecue sign in Texas. My favorite word is "bodacious"

Thanks for gumption which I just learned.
Callipygian I knew, but well, I'm French...
;-)
And I just learned phalanstère/phalanstery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanst%C3%A8re)

Ahh suitable1 Those were the days! Every Dick, Jane and Sally had dog and cat!
My recent reminder of a word I learned is miasma- it has shown up in several books lately.

The dog and cat in the Dick and Jane books were Spot and Puff. Very imaginative. I learned reciprocity in my 20s that for some reason always sticks in my mind. Gerrymander and nepotism also come to mind.

>19 librorumamans: & >21 dypaloh: I learned callipygian from a book that mentioned the statue Venus Callipyge.

From Jane Eyre: assiduous celerity. So many great and underused words in that book, but those stick with me.

Supercalafragalistic expialidocious. If you say it loud enough, you’ll always sound precocious!

I learned "simpatico" from Dune, where it is used too often (at least twice).

From an econ book called Mass Flourishing, I learned "corporatism," an uncommon word that refers to the control of a state or organization by large interest groups.

My favorite word is one I learned from The Irrationalist... Defenestrate.

I've been threatening to defenestrate people for weeks now! 😂

>31 jesscombs: Oh. Oh my. This is SO going to be my new threat. HA!

Recalling my childhood ... both at about age 7 or 8

Procession .... when reading about the May procession in honor of the Virgin Mary

Pneumonia ... when reading a Nancy Drew book. I have such a vivid memory of this particular word because I was visiting a friend who was a few years older than me, and I was reading HER books. We were in the back seat of the car and I asked her what this word meant ... pronouncing the hard 'P' sound at the beginning, and she took a look and corrected me.

>31 jesscombs: That's one of my favorite words!

From „The Sixteen Trees of the Somme“ by Lars Mytting:
Turquoise Turtle Knot

A very imaginative name for a knot to tie shoelaces.

'Humin' and 'humic acid.' Both still somewhat mysterious soil components; but important in long term storage of CO₂. Defined as 'Nonextractable Soil Organic Matter.' Discovered in Michael Pollan's Second Nature and also in The Soil Will Save Us, by Kristin Ohlson.

Ghastly

eleemosynary - meaning charitable, which I think I first encountered in Roy Jenkins's biography of Gladstone

I also like archaic, slightly different forms of modern words that I have picked up from 18th/19th century literature, e.g. "massy" for "massive", "leathern" for "leather" (as an adjective), "shew" for "show".

Prolepsis (Bud Sparhawk's blog from yesterday: https://budsparhawk.blogspot.com/2018/08/discovery.html)

My favorite recent one is 'perquisites', as in the 'perks' of a job. Picked that one up from God Against The Gods; had to actually look it up.

I was about to say that as far as English is concerned, I've undoubtedly learnt most words from books, but that might not actually be true: I've also learnt many from newspapers, webpages, etc. What I haven't done is learning many from spoken language.

>3 amanda4242:

"Eldritch" is a (big) exception, but most Lovecraftian words I learnt not from the man himself or his epigones, but from popular science texts: which presumably is where he learnt them himself.

Didactic .... used in some LT reviews, and since learning it I've used it myself a few times.

>28 krazy4katz: We used to sing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in our fifth-grade class as prep for learning about long words (e.g., “antidisestablishmentarianism” and “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis”), which appealed to our love of the extreme.

I’d never thought about it before, but Mary Poppins just figured kids could handle unfamiliar words. I still remember trying to make sense of “suffragette” and “fiduciary.”

>42 AndreasJ: I just now learned “epigones” as a result of reading the post by AndreasJ.

My mother used to make us look to a dictionary to learn how to spell words we didn't know how to spell. This backfired against her and my year 10 high school English teacher who used to look down her nose at me because I had previously gone to a country town school I loved the dictionary, still do, so many words that lead you to more interesting words that lead to even more interesting words. I have no idea why my mother hated my using my extended vocabulary when she led me to it.
Back to the question - one of my favourite words became 'rout' after using it in an English report. The aforementioned teacher decided to loudly call me up to the front of the class to explain the meaning/usage of the word to her which I did perfectly, having learnt it just before said report had been given to the class. She was very quiet when she told me to go and sit down again and never underestimated my ability to use the English language effectively again

From Eric Idle's Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: luthier, a maker of stringed musical instruments.

Learned a new one tonight: forkbait. In one of Horace's satires. Used when speaking to misbehaving slaves & refers to a punishment sometimes given them.

Buss from an Edward Cline book. English word to kiss.

"sesquipedalian", the word that Mr Polly mangles as "sesquippledan", from one of Ivor Brown's word books. (Lots of Ivor Browns on LT, but the touchstone appears to go to the right one.) I read this in my callow youth, and noticed that he had the definition wrong--the book said it meant "six feet long", and I checked and found out that it actually meant "foot and a half long". Brashly I wrote and told him, and got a very polite reply acknowledging that I was right.

Megrim. Bunyip. Riparian. Ribaldry.

Just reading a novel set in early 19th century Northumberland, with some great North English/Scottish dialect words such as marra (mate or companion) and scran (food)

>52 john257hopper: sorry for a slightly weird question, but does any of the words “fize”, “Gabriel” or “ratchet” (the latter 2 in any meaning other than their ordinary ones) occur in it?
Explanation: on another website that I hang out on, we were trying to decode the title Fize of the Gabriel Ratchets. There seems to be some connection with Northumbria.

>53 haydninvienna: - no they don't (it's a Kindle book, so I've just done a search for each word, but none of them come up).

>54 john257hopper: That’s actually what I expected but thanks for looking anyway. I think Mr Norwood made the words up, and the connection with Northumbria was a coincidence.