nonchalant elegance and phantom fangs
bizarre words I’ve recently learned thanks to smart people and creatures on the internet
Today has been a huge day, so here are some new words.
But before, some future reader teasers.
In my upcoming Substacks you’ll get interviews with
- an American poet in Paris, Jason Stoneking
- leader of Novocastrian Mauri Dance club Te Ukaipo, Shvon Coster
- talented, chaotic and deep local artist Jen Denzin.
I need to interview a scientist and pragmatic banker soon to make sure everything is in equilibrium.
Until I get to typing up these Rockstar interviews, here are bizarre words I’ve learned thanks to smart people and machines around me.
gadabout: a habitual pleasure-seeker. (My friend Paul introduced me as this on ABC radio Friday, and once I learned the definition I was very okay with it.)
limerence: a state of mind resulting from romantic feelings for another person. It typically involves intrusive and melancholic thoughts, or tragic concerns for the object of one's affection, along with a desire for the reciprocation of one's feelings and to form a relationship with the object of love.
It’s basically a one-word-version of unrequited love.
And unrequited love is the worst, but it’s also the best, because the hottest thing
about love is not being sure whether or not the other person feels the same way (a least in stunted teenage girl minds like mine). If it is requited then eventually it will get boring. If it’s unrequited you’ll either get over it and become stronger or you’ll spend the rest of your life obsessing over someone which is not very practical but is very poetic. I don’t want to be obsessed with someone forever, but I suppose there are worse ways to go. And I like the idea of the roles being reversed.
odontalgia: chronic pain in the tooth, or more interestingly, “phantom tooth pain.” It could be from an infected tooth or it could be pain from a tooth that’s gone. Ghost fangs! A perfect dentistry concoction, just in time for Halloween.
sprezzatura: thank you to whoever submitted this word to my Instagram stories, which means in Italian, “effortless grace.” A Substack is already dedicated to concept, so with the opposite of sprezzatura, I’ll clumsily bow out of analyzing it before I completely expose my subpar vocabulary.
rumbled: my friend sent me this word she’s rediscovered. While it has many definitions, I’m pretty sure she likes the British version which means to discover (an illicit activity or its perpetrator).
EG
They’ve rumbled the moonshine!
My husband rumbled my rumpus with the next door neighbor.
The rumblers of hell’s angels are flying down the highway.
peripatetic- (an adjective) nomadic, (a noun) meaning traveler or (proper noun?) Aristotelian philosopher!
pulchritudinous- this word to me sounds gross, like death and decaying, but it means beautiful actually! I don’t know if it’s the first pickup line I’d use.
And now my eyelids are like bowling balls, but I will try to use all these words in one long and ridiculous sentence on my way to snoozyville.
The gadabout was rumbled, despite her perpetual limerence when her pulchritudinous peripatetic lover began to display sprezzatura signs of a nitrous addiction which all started as a result of odontalgia and other phantom pains.