Just discovered this sub and thought y'all might appreciate this.

A while back I read the memoir of an Italian chemist named Primo Levi who lived a remarkable life. On top of being a fascinating guy, he had quite a command of the English language and I found I had to look up words every few pages. Eventually I started writing them down in this list and afterwards I kept the habit up with other things I read. The ongoing list is here.

Haruspex - a diviner in ancient Rome basing his predictions on inspection of the entrails of sacrificial animals

I need any English expressions (poetical, literary, slang) that hold the meaning of when a lover can't sleep due to how much they're thinking about their lover. in Arabic we can laterally translate it to "she made sleeping fly away from my eyes" since he spends the whole night thinking about her. Thanks :)

Example:

• It's all normal and cool and then something feels off, the panoply of sounds now seem distinct, your pupils dilate to see a greater range of light, your brain fizzes up a bit in the top, your scalp tingles. And then it fades, like it's all cool again.
• It was a passing attentive-vigilance type presence-awareness for a moment. An adrenaline-ish buzz that seemingly slowed down time. The brain invokes readiness mode.
• Imagine you're out hiking and smelling a deadly predator's scent. Pheromones or something subconscious causes a wave of situational awareness. Your body says it's go-time, pre-games for responsiveness in case something jumps out. You've experienced this altered state of consciousness, a momentary alertness primed for the unknown.

What other words capture that essence, please?

Words not fitting as well:

• Manic (too chaotic)
• Fight or flight (too binary)
• Hyper vigilance (too inelegant)
• Anxious (nope)
• In the zone (too focused)
• Aware/present/conscientious (too passive)

Connected with a wish, intention, or effort to do something.

• There is a long-established distinction in psychology between cognitive and conative aspects of behavior.
• If we wish to describe the whole person, conative aspects must be included.

Further context:

• Psychology: Refers to conation, which is the third part of the human mind alongside cognition (thinking/knowing) and affect (feeling/emotion). It is the internal force or "will to act" that turns thoughts and feelings into purposeful behavior.
• Linguistics / Grammar: Describes a verb form or affix that expresses an attempt or endeavor to do something, rather than the successful completion of the action.
• Communications: Refers to a message function designed to influence or prompt a reaction/behavior from the receiver.

Definition, per the rules: the clipped style used in telegrams; more broadly, prose stripped to its paid-for minimum.

Western Union actually published a manual for it. "How to Write Telegrams Properly," a 1928 booklet by Nelson E. Ross, taught ordinary people how to cut a sentence without losing the meaning. Drop the articles, drop the pronouns, drop the courtesy words, never drop the word that changes the meaning. People paid by the word, so the grammar adapted to the price list. A register invented by a billing model.

The strange part is that the machine died and the register didn't. Newspaper headlines still run on it. Ingrid Mårdh's 1980 linguistic study of English front pages catalogued "headlinese": article omission, present tense for past events, missing copulas. The classroom marks every one of those as an error. The front page requires all of them.

I run a daily word game built on exactly this: one real sentence, and you keep five of its words so the story survives.

The game: sheets.works/long-story-short

: a representation of words or syllables by pictures of objects or by symbols whose names resemble the intended words or syllables in sound

also : a riddle made up of such pictures or symbols

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rebus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus

encountered today while reading Fredric Jameson's 'Marxism and Form' (1971, 1974)

For unbeknownst to us, the objects around us lead lives of their own in our unconscious fantasies, where, vibrant with mana or taboo, with symbolic fascination or repulsion, they stand as the words or hieroglyphs of the immense rebus of desire. [p.99]

"difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend"

or

"of, relating to, or dealing with something little known or obscure"

or

"hidden from sight"

What is it when you feel sorry and empathise or even feel compassion with someone who has done very bad things, even if they dont look like they care or even proud, but especially if they do feel guilt and self loathing, but still think and even be motivated they should be put down or even destroy that person as a way to protect others from that person

(adj.)(especially related to women), large in a beautiful way.

Verb: "to dress especially in fine clothing—usually used with 'up' or 'out'"

assuage, verb. To ease or soften something painful. Etymonline characterises its typical objects as pain, anger, passion or grief, and that list is the useful part of the entry.

Notice what it never seems to take. You assuage guilt, fear, hunger, doubt, a conscience. I can't think of a sentence where someone assuages delight, and I don't think I've ever seen one. The verb appears to need something bitter to work on.

The root explains why. It reaches English around 1300 as asswagen, from Old French assoagier, from Vulgar Latin adsuaviare, built on Latin suavis, sweet or agreeable. To assuage grief is, at the bottom of the word, to sweeten it.

That is the whole shape of the thing. It presupposes a sour taste and adds sugar. Which is also why "assuage" always feels partial to me when I read it, in a way "cure" or "end" does not. Sweetening is not removing. The grief is still grief; something has been added to make it bearable.

The cousin worth knowing is suave. Same suavis, same PIE root swād-, sweet or pleasant. And sweet itself comes down from that root too, through Germanic rather than Latin, so English ended up with the same ancient idea arriving twice by different doors and settling into completely different registers. One is a taste, one is a manner, one is what you do to someone's fear.

Middle English also had a clipped version, swage, which I would quite like back.

1 ˈnüs also ˈnau̇s : mind, reason: such as a : an intelligent purposive principle of the world b : the divine reason regarded in Neoplatonism as the first emanation of God 2 ˈnau̇s chiefly British : common sense, alertness

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nous

Interesting new word encountered while reading Victor Pelevin's 'Babylon' (1999):

'The situation's like this.' Morkovin went on. 'There are only a few studios that make the videos, and they're desperate for writers with nous, because these days everything depends on the writer.

“something that is used to bind”

or

“a compound note in mensural notation indicating a group of musical notes to be sung to one syllable”

or

“a printed or written character (such as æ or ff) consisting of two or more letters or characters joined together”

A noun, from the French. ("o-rahnzh-ree" or "aw-rinzh-uh-ree" or "or-inj-uh-ree")

A dedicated winter home for tubbed or potted non-hardy citrus. Orangeries are typically built in the Northern Hemisphere.

Also seen as "orangery," which has a somewhat different flavor in text, but the same meaning-- a building for citrus trees.

Oranges are botanically referred to as a hesperidian berry, and the fruit, orange itself is a "hesperidium." . . . From this arises a new question-- would an ancient Roman orangerie perhaps be a hesperidiumarium?

(adj.): strange, unusual, rare; unfamiliar; wondrous
From Old English seldcūþ: seld- ("rarely") + cūþ ("known"), the same couth as in uncouth, which originally meant "unknown, unfamiliar."

I built a word game named after this word and I'm looking for a few people to tell me what works and what doesn't.

Short passages from great books with a few words missing, and you fill in the blanks from context. The whole game is attention to the author's word choice, thinking about the language and why the author used it.

For example, from Pride and Prejudice:

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of _____. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."

honesty / virtue / humility

Austen wrote humility.

Rare words are the heart of it. Blanks are chosen on salience and Zipf rarity, and there's a commonplace book for keeping the words and passages you love. I'm working on adding search capability that finds passages by word usage across the entire corpus.

It's a free iOS app, 30 classics with over 9000 puzzles.

selcouth.io

Texts are Standard Ebooks editions, definitions from Wiktionary.

inchoate (adj.), /ɪnˈkoʊ.ət/ — just begun; only partly in existence; not yet fully formed.

Etymonline dates that sense to the 1530s. The Latin is inchoatus, from inchoare, itself an alteration of an older incohare. Here is the part I like, with the caveat that the trail is not solid: the traditional derivation takes incohare back to cohum, the strap that fastened a plough-beam to an ox yoke. De Vaan's reading is that "to yoke a plough to a team of oxen" slid naturally into "to start work." Etymonline allows a core of truth in that ancient connection while noting that cohum itself is of obscure origin, so this is the probable story rather than a settled one.

I like it anyway, because it puts something physical under a very abstract word. An inchoate plan is not a vague cloud of intention. It is a plough with the animals just being tied on.

Two practical notes. The ch is a hard k, so it is in-KOH-ut, and the -ch- spelling is the later form; the classical shape was incohare.

And it does not mean chaotic, which is the usual misfire. Inchoate says early, not disordered. The cleanest place to see that is law, where an inchoate offence is a real technical category: an attempt, a conspiracy, a crime begun and not completed. Nothing messy about it. Just unfinished.

The writing or compilation of glosses (brief explanations (as in the margin or between the lines of a text) of difficult or obscure words or expressions).

And a glossographer (N) is someone who compiles them.

adj-

-having the power, intent, or capacity to save, rescue, or redeem someone or something from harm, loss, or ruin.

"one of the major divisions of a long poem"

(noun)

The essential nature or distinctive quality of something; what makes a thing what it is.

Quiddity comes from the Medieval Latin quidditas, from quid meaning “what.” Philosophers used it to describe the fundamental “whatness” of a thing.

💬 Challenge: Can you use quiddity in a sentence, or name something whose essential quality is difficult to put into words? 🧠📚

"Relating to a word or an expression whose meaning depends on who says it, where they are, who they are talking to."

"with all possible speed"