Word(s) of the day: Fluorescence/Florescence

Sometimes I come across something in my editing that I'm pretty sure I know already but I think, eh, you know what, I'll just look it up real fast. 

And then the extent of my wrongness HITS ME IN THE FACE WITH THE FORCE OF A DOZEN BASEBALLS. 

I've seen "fluorescent" spelled as "florescent" occasionally, and I figured it was a spelling-variation thing. But when the issue came up in a novel I'm editing, I thought I'd make sure, and LO AND BEHOLD, this is what I discovered:

fluo-res-cence (n):  luminescence that is caused by the absorption of radiation at one wavelength followed by nearly immediate reradiation usually at a different wavelength and that ceases almost at once when the incident radiation stops (In other words, the light bulb kind)

flo-res-cence (n): a state or period of flourishing

Mind.

Blown. 

So if you ever come across a text talking about a "florescent" light bulb, that almost certainly refers not to an environmentally friendly alternative to an incandescent light bulb, but rather to a light bulb experiencing a period of growth and plenty in its natural habitat.

Ah, yes. Look at that beautiful florescence.

Word of the Day: Consumption

AAAAHHHH INTERNET NEVER LET ME LEAVE YOU AGAIN.

Just kidding. It wasn’t that bad. 

If you read my last post, Creativity and Consumption, all the way through, you know I spent yesterday in a relatively media-less environment in an attempt to bolster my creativity.

It went well, and it sort of worked? I didn’t add to the novel, but I did tackle some projects that I’ve been meaning to do, like finishing up transcribing my journal. So that was good. 

Plus, when I woke up this morning, my whole brain was like INTERNET INTERNET INTERNET INTERNET and I was like YES YES YES YES YES and then I spent six hours on Tumblr and Vlogbrothers and Facebook and YEA VERILY IT WAS A HIGHLY ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE. 

It was much like the time that I spent five days eating only vegetables and lean meat and then on day six I had a cinnamon roll and that cinnamon roll was, without question, the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in my life. That’s how the Internet tasted this morning. (Not literally, Bridey, no, stop that. You can’t lick the Internet.)

This experience made me consider the word consumption itself. “Consumption” used to be the term for tuberculosis,* which seems oddly unrelated to the way I’ve been thinking about consumption as “taking in and using lots of stuff.” But it makes more sense when considered alongside the first definition of “consume” as found in Merriam-Webster:

                To do away with completely: Destroy.

And it gets worse:

                To spend wastefully: Squander.

Use up.

Devour. 

It makes sense. When you consume food, it’s gone. I guess I was just thinking about “consumption” in the context of media, and in that sense, no, when I watch YouTube videos they don’t disappear. I’m not destroying anything when I consume YouTube videos. 

Or am I? Sure, the contents of the Tumblr I’m reading aren’t gone after I consume them—but my time is. My passion and motivation might be, too. 

Basically, the way my brain cries out for MOAR INTERNET NOW PLZ is about as healthy to indulge as the way my brain cries out for more cinnamon rolls. Both are most satisfying and healthiest in moderation. 

Yesterday's experience helped me see that I need to produce more, to spend more time actively creating and less time passively consuming. Maybe if I did so, I would feel less compelled to end this post with "Hank, I'll see you on Friday."

*According to the OED, “consumption” as a disease was first used in 1398 I love the OED and it referred generally to a “wasting” of the body before narrowing in its meaning to “tuberculosis.”

Word(s) of the Day: Thank-you and Thank-you-ma'am

I’ve been wondering about what to do with the phrase “thank you” when it’s used as a noun (“a big thank you goes out to Bill”) or as an adjective (“I sent him a thank you card”) and, like any editor or writer should, I decided to check the all-powerful Merriam-Webster. 

This is what I found:

thank-you n [fr. the phrase thank you used in expressing gratitude] (1792): a polite expression of one’s gratitude

So, yes, “thank-you” is the correct form for a noun; and just to make myself feel better, I also checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which confirmed Webster’s. (Or I think it did. I am not very good at using COCA yet, but it is a super-cool resource.) Neither source said anything about the adjective form of “thank you,” but since it’s pretty standard to hyphenate two-part adjectives (like I just did there, ha!) then I think I’m safe to use “thank-you note.”

But the fun part comes next. When I looked up “thank-you,” I happened to glance at the entry below it, and this is what I found.

thank-you-ma’am n [prob. fr. its causing a nodding of the head] (1849): a bump or depression in a road; esp: a ridge or hollow made across a road on a hillside to cause water to run off

SWEET. New vocabulary word for the win. I love the dictionary. 

Have you come across any awesome new words lately?

Word of the Day: Obverse

I often edit academic writing, and one of the perks of doing so, besides learning about subjects I didn’t get the chance to take classes on, is running across words I have never seen before. I mean, you can discover new words in any kind of writing, but there’s usually a higher chance of doing so in specialized writing, like academic writing, than in mainstream writing. I said writing four times in that sentence. Holy cow, lady, buy a thesaurus. 

I read a lot, so coming across words with which I’m completely unfamiliar doesn’t happen that often. (Coming across words with which I’m vaguely familiar but unsure enough about that I need to check the dictionary to make sure they’re being used correctly, on the other hand, happens ALL THE TIME.) So my reaction to a new word goes something like this: 

Me: What the heck, “obverse”? What does that mean? That is so not a word. What was this writer thinking? He made this up and I will prove it.

Me: *fetches dictionary*

Me: Yes, lalala, flipping through pages, I love this dictionary, look at all these wooorrds, I have the best job, okay, here are the O’s, it’ll come after objurgation, after obstreperous…

Me: Oh. Obverse. There you are.

Me: Coooooolll. 

So! Obverse is totally a word! And it’s a pretty neat word, too. It can be an adjective or a noun, and it means “facing the observer or opponent,” “having the base narrower than the top,” “opposite”; the front side of a coin, “a counterpart having the opposite orientation or force,” or “a proposition inferred immediately from another by denying the opposite of what the given proposition affirms.”*

Some in-use examples of obverse:

I stood obverse to my foe, both our swords raised, ready to begin.

The leaves of a four-leaf clover are obverse.

On the color wheel, red is the obverse of green.

The obverse of a quarter features the face of George Washington.

“The obverse of ‘all A is B’ is ‘no A is not B.’”**

These leaves are totes obverse, y’all.

There’s also a regular adverbial form, obversely, though evidently Microsoft Word doesn’t like it. Eh, it also doesn’t like “objurgation.” Fussy.

What new words have you learned lately?

*Definitions taken from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 11^th edition, page 857.

**Also taken from Merriam-Webster.