A Miscellany of New Words

I continue to assiduously note new words I encounter, not unlike a wee gnome giddily gathering charms from the floor of a wizard’s workshop. New spells for my sachet of incantations!

From the NYT:

• Zhuzh [up]: to spice up, figuratively; to add some extra oomph to something. A spoiler for the NYT mini crossword from March 13, 2024. For a full story about the word, see this Times article from a few years prior.
• Uxorious: Doting to the point of subservience in marital matters. From another NYT article.

From chapters by various authors in Field Notes on Science and Nature, edited by Michael Canfield:

• Taphonomy: the study of the process of decay and fossilization, or that process itself.
• Chador: a garment; used figuratively, as I recall, to describe something similarly veiled.
• Gentes; plural of gens: a clan or group of related individuals; specially, a subset of a [brood] parasite population that associates with a particular host.

From Orbital, by Samantha Harvey:

• Birling: logrolling. Here, the similarly centered motion of rotating planets and orbiting bodies.
• Scarper: to flee or escape.
• Tranche: a portion or slice (perhaps specifically financial).

Miscellaneous:

• Feculent: foul. From Jamie Ford’s Esperanto in A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams.
• Mojibake: gibberish that appears when text is rendered with the wrong character encoding. Learned the term while attempting to diagnose a misbehaving web browser.

Posted on Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024.