WSU Word Warriors Compile List of Couth, Recondite Words
This story has a happy ending, also known as a eucatastrophe.
Compiling a list can seem like a task that’s impossible to overcome. There’s a word for that feeling: “insuprable.”
It’s one of the entries on this year’s Word Warriors list from Wayne State University. Unlike Lake Superior State University’s list of “banished” words and phrases, WSU’s list aims to resurrect words that are underused and overlooked.
Compiling and editing the list is a linguistic labor of love for Jerry Herron. He’s the Dean of WSU’s Irvin D. Reid Honors College.
“It’s a passion for making the world look more beautiful, delightful, engaging, and descriptively accurate,” Herron says. “The more intelligent, delightful, beautiful, charming ways we have to describe out experience, the more rich our experience becomes.”
Herron points out the English language has thousands of little-known, or recondite, words.
“In English, we have the embarrassment of riches,” Herron says. It’s maybe the largest lexicon of any language, which means these great words that we have at our disposal are forgotten.”
Now, the list:
- Insuperable–Impossible to overcome.
- Eucatastrophe–A sudden and favorable resolution of events in a story; a happy ending.
- Frangible–Fragile; brittle.
- Couth–Cultured, refined, and well-mannered.
- Compunction–A feeling of guilt or moral scruple that prevents or follows the doing of something bad.
- Recondite–(Of a subject or knowledge) little-known; abstruse.
- Nugatory–Of no value or importance.
- Bilious–Spiteful; bad-tempered.
- Littoral–Relating to or situated on the shore of the sea or a lake.
- Picaresque–Relating to an episodic style of fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest, but appealing hero.
Herron says people around the world nominate words for the list at the Word Warriors web site.
Click on the audio player to hear the conversation with WDET’s Pat Batcheller.
MORE from WDET: Banished Words List Has Tons of Impactful Entries
