A fun way to mark the time, certainly more fun than by watching the lame word of the year features from English-language dictionaries that last week’s Word of the Week covered, is to keep a running list of new words you learn. The typical 2-year-old will have picked up a thousand words and will have begun to figure out pronouns. By 5, he or she will have expanded that vocabulary to some 10,000 words.
Of course, you do not remember this happening. Most of the time, when you learn a new word, you will not notice it. It just plonks down into your lexicon. Or you will learn a new “word” — that is, you will hear some slang usage that only later will be accepted or rejected but anyway is in your mind now. I seem to recall “on fleek” being a thing in maybe 2018, but it’s mercifully dead now. It continues to be in my vocabulary, for some awful reason. Anyway, however many words I may have learned in my second year here on Earth, I am only aware of learning about 17 this year in English. I love them all. And I am grateful to the enviably eloquent, never sesquipedalian Justin E. H. Smith for having taught me more words than anyone else this year. Half of them are below, the next half to come in the next Word of the Week, after the holidays.
Iatrogenesis: This is a word for a harm brought about by a healer. If you caught COVID-19 at a COVID testing center, you had an iatrogenic case. If you got radiation poisoning from a broken X-ray machine (note: this is not a thing that really happens) or depression from taking finasteride for male-pattern baldness (a thing that happens a lot), that would be an instance of iatrogenesis.
Clavis: This is a glossary or a key to decoding something. It comes from the same root as the word for clavicle, an old key being the same shape as that bone. Similarly, it is the relative of “clef,” the word in musical notation that we now most commonly use to divide the bass and treble on our speakers and which is rendered in that key-like shape.
Feculent: This means full of s***. But fancy. It comes from the same root as feces/faeces.
Enantiomorphic: This word from the Greek words for “mirror” and “form” is mainly used in crystal science. It means something very similar to symmetrical, but not quite. I’m still working on understanding it, to be honest.
Circumjoviating: I came across this in New Yorker writer Kathryn Schultz’s memoir, and it is easily the most delightful one on this list. It means to go around Jupiter, of course. Satellites of the gas giant are called circumjovialists, which makes me feel jovial. Manmade objects, such as the Juno spacecraft, have circumjoviated, but no human has. Yet.
Megrim: This word, an archaic term for a fad that evolved into the word “migraine,” obviously has multiple meanings. It can mean vertigo or dizziness. Or it can mean whim, as in fancy. Or, when plural, it can mean low spirits. Gives me a headache just thinking about it.
Materteral: There’s a chance you know the word “avuncular,” meaning uncle-like: friendly and helpful, unlike most men. I think it should be a way to describe a cardigan-heavy wardrobe. But anyway, the aunty equivalent to “avuncular” is “materteral,” a word for aunt-y.
Supercilious: Someone called me this word, which means behaving as though one feels superior to others. But just because I speak grandiloquently, even magniloquently, and with great bombast, employing an aureate lexicon, that does not make me hubristic. I just like words.
Send your favorite obscure and novel bits of verbiage from 2022 in for a chance to run alongside the rest of my new words of 2022, for which you’ll have to wait until the new year. I wish you a joyous one.
