Lexical Compendium

Wait... what is this? Sometimes I come across a word, phrase, idiom, quote, reference, bit of slang, person of interest, etc that either I don't know or I find amusing, interesting, etc. This is a collection of those items so that I can refer back to them in emails, texts, etc.

Recent Entries:

Tag Cloud

vocabulary slang quote politics eponymous ai science television space music word jargon movie idiom history computer-science covid thagomizer civil war shiva toffee bezos computer_science grammar earth krishna software latin movies lindy economy bees leahy ants aussie lincoln writing neologism disinformation pie chickpeas abrogate spanish pulses paradox aphorism entertainment desert religion podcast food stegosaurus astronaut engineering book foreign language aws vision israel-hamas war lindy effect clock social_insect government language virus war international time Don Quixote story screamo ottoman foreign metaphor grumbletonian games lindy's law banana plot amazon ice succession law apollo sockdologizing trading_places quotes acronym expression paleontology engine clerks spoonerism legal poem british op-ed far side public_health carl_sagan geography hindu dinosaur creole

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!"

From Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," a poem in "Through the Looking Glass."

The poem was about the capture and killing of a creature called the "Jabberwock" and is filled with many other nonsense terms.

The word "jabberwocky," itself, has come to mean something meaningless in writing.


(link to this entry)

References:

Tags: quote, book, poem

Date Added: Unknown

anathema

An anathema is something or someone that is abhorrent or extremely disliked.

I came across this word while reading an essay, "'Weird' Should Not Be An Insult."

Using “weird” as an insult ought to be anathema to Democrats.

Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Democrats took to calling Republicans (especially Donald Trump and his VP candidate JD Vance) weird. (And the Republican retort seems to be: "I'm not weird, you are.")

While writing this, it's too early to know whether or not this tact will pay off.

The word anathema has its origins in the Greek word anatithenai, meaning "to dedicate." In the "Old Testament" of "The Bible," the word anathema is sometimes used in this way. Interestingly, the meaning of the word shifted to mean something accursed or repulsive and translated into Hebrew as herem. We see this meaning in the "New Testament" of "The Bible."

The ecclesiastical meaning of the word still exists today (it's the second definition in Merriam-Webster's dictionary). A more prominent use in English, though, is something that is vehemently disliked.


(link to this entry)

References:

Tags: vocabulary

Date Added: 03 Aug 2024

"...an effective plot must be 'unexpected but inevitable'..."

I came across this quote in the television series Mythic Quest. In that show, it was attributed to Aristotle, but I haven't been able to confirm this.


(link to this entry)

References:

Tags: writing, plot, quotes, story

Date Added: Unknown