genericide /jə-NAIR-ə-siyd/. noun. A more colorful term for when a trademarked name becomes genericized, or so commonly used that it becomes generic and is in danger of losing its protected status. Kleenex and Band-Aid are the prototypical victims of genericide. Technically, when a brand name is used generically, it is an example of antonomasia, a kind of metonymy in which a proper name is used for a common name. Fear of genericide is why you don’t hear Google employees using Google as a verb or see it used that way in their official sites and documentation. Google it and see!
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WORD(S)
A cornucopia—a logocopia!—of awesome words.
oronym
oronym /OR-uh-nim/. noun. A sequence of words or which sounds like a different sequence of words because of ambiguous word boundaries in speech. “I scream” and “ice cream” are perhaps the most common examples. An oronym is essentially an extended version of the homophone, which usually refers to single words that sound alike. Many puns are oronymic, such as “visualize whirled peas.” Mondegreens, or misheard song lyrics (“excuse me while I kiss this guy”) are musical oronyms and many mistakes in popular sayings result from this kind of confusion such as “it’s a doggy dog world.” Coined by Gyles Brandreth in his 1980 book The Joy of Lex.
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crash blossoms
crash blossom. noun. An ambiguous headline, particularly one that yields comedic interpretations. Coined in 2009 by Danny Bloom based on the headline “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms” in Japan Today, crash blossoms tend to occur in headlines because of space constraints. These linguistic gems are a kind of garden path sentence, in which one must backtrack to resolve an ambiguity, most often due to words that can be nouns or verbs, as in the classic example: “The old man the boat.”
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triffid
A lot of words have come to us from science fiction, such as robot, coined by Karel Čapek in his influential play “R.U.R.” (or Rossum’s Universal Robots) as well as now common scientific and popular terms like Zero-G and cyberspace.
But sometimes a word evolves to more literary uses, such as this episode’s word: triffid /TRIF-id/ noun. Generally speaking, a triffid is a vigorous, rapidly-developing, usually invasive plant. But in its original use, these plants were also mobile, malignant and carnivorous, with a sting demonstrably capable of killing humans. These were the plants John Wyndham was describing when he coined the term in his 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. (Incidentally, Wyndham writes that the word evolved from the “etymological gymkhana” around the combination of “tri” (three) and “it…”
drumlin
drumlin /DRUM-lin/ noun. A ridge, or a low hill, often oval (think of a half-buried egg), formed by—and in the direction of—glacial movement. Originally applied to landforms in Ireland and Scotland, such as Dromore (Droim Mór, or Large Ridge) and Drumoak (Druim M’Aodhaig, or the ridge of St Aodhag). From the Irish & Scottish Gaelic druim (a ridge or the back of a person or animal), from Old Irish druimm (same meaning), origins unknown.
litotes
litotes /LIY-toh-teez/. noun. A figure of speech using understatement to express an affirmative by negating its opposite. The description sounds more complicated than the simply reality in use: it is basically the opposite of hyperbole. “Warren Buffett isn’t too bad off,” is an example, as would be John Coltrane saying he “played the sax a little.” If you’ve ever used a phrase like, “he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed,” then you employed litotes. From Greek litotes (simplicity); from litos (small). See also: meiosis, which includes understatement of other kinds.
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interoception
interoception /in-tair-oh-SEP-shən/. noun. The sense of conditions and stimuli within the body. Compare to exteroception (the sense of stimuli acting on the body) and proprioception (the sense of the position of the body, and parts of the body, to other bodies or parts of the body).
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