Words we love

[mutepointe]

Trounce.

[benhall.1]

Moist. Say it slowly. Relish it. Roll your tongue round it. Mmmmm .... moist.

[Nanohedron]

Snood.

[benhall.1]

Snood??!?!! Seriously? SNOOD!!!?????

[Nanohedron]

Yes.

Not for meaning, but for the sound. Snood. It's a rather silly word, don't you think? Snood.

[stanton135]

Words we love? Yes, lots of them!

In English, "asunder", for sound and meaning.

In Spanish, "aovaríais", for meaning. It means approximately "[ye] would lay [eggs]". I keep waiting for the occasion when I can use it.

I also just started learning Dutch, and the Dutch word for "walk" makes me smile whenever I say it, in any of its forms: "lopen". "Ik loop", "zij loopt", "jullie lopen".

[Nanohedron]

Twirly.

[benhall.1]

Ah, you mean like the old age pensioners who used to get on my bus (when I was a bus driver) 5 minutes before their passes were valid, and say, "Am I twirly?"

[Nanohedron]

I use it to describe people well in their cups.

[maki]

Schooner.
Sharpie.
Skiff.

[chas]

Terry Carr wrote a short story called "Stanley Toothbrush," which was sort-of about the way words sound. It starts out with the protagonist looking at a shelf in his medicine cabinet and thinking how odd it is that we associate the sound "shelf" with something so useful. All his shelves disappear.

Ever since then I've found the word "shelf" interesting and odd-sounding.

There are loads of words I love, mostly because of the way they sound, or the relationship between the sound and meaning.

impecunious, and its relative, penury
nadir, and its opposite, acme (poor manufacturer of road-runner-anihilation equipment)
brain cramp (as in what I'm experiencing now)

[MTGuru]

Read enough of Gerard Manley Hopkins - aloud, always aloud - and before long all of English begins to sound rich and strange on the tongue.

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Source: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21417

[an seanduine]

Pied Beauty


GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Yes the good Fr. had a way with words. . . .

Bob

[kkrell]

Redhead

[trill]

Twas brilig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/

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