Words-of-the-day

Agoraphobia
1. Fear of open spaces, or sometimes “being in public and having the feeling like you need to retreat home to a safe place.” Symptoms often cross-over with claustrophobia.

Ergasiophobia
1. Fear of hard work or aversion to difficult tasks.
If you are ergasiophobic, I recommend you do not take ENG 102 with me!

Kopophobia
1. Fear of exhaustion.
“My kopophobia really hits hard Thursday night. I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it to 8AM Friday class.”

Canorous (adj.)
1. song-like, melodic, or sweet sounding.

Welter (noun)
1. pile of seemingly random objects with no apparent order

Interminable (adj.)
1. endless, without limit

Colloquialism (noun), colloquial (adj.)
1. informal expression of speech, e.g., “YO, MAD, PHAT”

Commune (verb)
1. to be in close contact with, to have intense communication with
“We communed over the racist tendencies of the local police force.”

Apathetic (adjective)
1. to feel indifferent (towards something)
2. to “not care about” something
great synonym: spiritless

Mendacious (adjective), mendaciously (adverb)
1. to be untrue or false
2. telling lies
“My professor mendaciously told me I was doing OK in the class, but he gave me an F.”

Philistine (noun)
1. derogatory term describing someone who is “hostile” towards “culture” or intellectual pursuits
2. colloquial term for someone who doesn’t like “art”

Girl 1: “Hey wanna study art history with me?”
Girl 2: “Eeew, no… I don’t do books.”
Girl 1: “Don’t be such a philistine! The great European masters have a lot of influence on the way we look at all sorts of pictures today!”

Prescient (adjective), prescience (noun)
(think “PRE-science,” or before knowledge)
1. foreknowledge of an event
2. anticipating something ahead of time

Countenance (verb used with object)
(kinda an obsolete word, but it was in Jonathan Kozol’s The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society)
1. expression of support
Angry mom to daughter: “You should not countenance your brother’s RUDE behavior!”

Benight (verb), benighted (adjective)
(also from Jonathan Kozol’s The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society)
1. overtake with darkness
2. take over or envelope with moral or intellectual darkness
3. in the adjective form, it describes ignorance
The benighted people of this region do not have adequate access to schools and reading materials.

Rhapsodize (verb)
1. to speak of something enthusiastically
Ernest Hemingway rhapsodizes over the effective use of citronella oil to keep black flies off you while you’re camping. (read about him doing this in The Short Prose Reader, Camping Out.)

Jollification (noun)
1. state of revelry or excitement
(also: jollify (verb), jollified (adj.))
Jollification came to him as he lay his final research project down in front of his comp two teacher.

Pugnacious (adj.)
1. quick to fight or bicker
Pugnacious football teams are more likely to win, but are also more likely to have injuries.

(phrase of the day): “Under the auspices of …“
1. with the protection or help of
2. “auspice” literally means “divine token”
Under the auspices of Wilk, he continued to write his research paper on Bob Saget and American sitcoms, even though his peers told him the topic was too juvenile.

bellwether (noun)
1. leader or front-runner
2. leading indicator of a trend
She was the bellwether of the new interdisciplinary staff in the Sociology department. A true universal intellectual, she brought with her a complex mastery of law, economics, and gender studies.

intrepid (adj.)
1. characterized by fearlessness
His intrepid approach to writing a research paper on legalization of marijuana somehow struck the instructor as unique, so the instructor permitted him to write on the topic, when otherwise the topic would’ve been banned as “overdone.”

magniloquent (adj.)
1. lofty, overblown, or grandiose speech
His magniloquent sentences that tried to contextualize the Words-of-the-day were too complex to be understood.
encroach (verb)
1. to enter stealthily or gradually upon another’s property or rights
The teacher began to encroach upon the classes’ privacy rights by using SynchronEyes to broadcast their essays to the whole class.

gregarious (adj.)
1. to be fond of the company of others
2. sociable
I found COMP II’s tendency to leisurely gather around a dictionary for informal discussion of their favorite words to be most gregarious and devoted.

piquant (adj.)
1. pleasantly pungent
2. unexpected
Her piquant wit always turned heads in class; some students would laugh, some would gasp and get red, but none would be unaffected.

egregious (adj.)
1. extraordinary in a bad way
His unabashed, unashamed, and poorly concealed plagiarism was of the most offensive kind; it committed every egregious sin of honest academic paper writing.

uber (adj.)
1. the ultimate or above all
I was uber bored in Church, so I fell asleep.

halcyon (adj.), or halcyon as a noun is a mythical bird that calms ocean waves with the beating of its wings
1. calm, restful, peaceful
We all wish to have had halcyon childhoods.

cloy (verb)
1. to be disgusted by the excess of something that is normally pleasant
I ate a doughnut for breakfast, ice cream for lunch, and then birthday cake for dinner; my stomach began to cloy with the torrent of sugar I had been pouring into my body.