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Words that you know that make you feel all clever

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    #51
    Speaking of petrichor, is there an equivalent word for how vibrant colours look when the Sun comes out after the rain?

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      #52
      Another word I learned via OTF is rhotic: "Relating to or denoting a dialect or variety of English (e.g. in most of the US and south-western England) in which r is pronounced before a consonant (as in "hard") and at the ends of words (as in "far")". There's also a noun, rhoticity.

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        #53
        Schwa is always a good one to throw in.

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          #54
          Originally posted by Furtho View Post
          There's also a noun, rhoticity.
          Not to be confused with rhotacism, which is pretty much the opposite.

          Abugida is another one from the field of linguistics I like to throw in occasionally - "a writing system which is between syllabic and alphabetic scripts" i.e. each glyph represents a consonant and a vowel paired.

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            #55
            Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
            Bailiwick. I use it all the time. And some say that Tom Clancy couldn't write literature.
            Bailiwick - as uttered in Deadwood the movie, in a pleasingly serendipitous and timely way.

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              #56
              Comorbidity

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                #57
                Another Baader-Meinhof moment for me. I had to look up comorbidity the other day. I thought it meant something like 'increasingly likely to lead to death', but the actual meaning 'presence of one or more conditions in addition to your primary condition' is less scary.

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                  #58
                  Obfuscation

                  If you don't know what the above word means, then that is a very good definition of it, because it means to deliberately mislead.

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                    #59
                    In that instance, you're not so much 'misled' as completely in the dark.

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                      #60
                      Originally posted by Diable Rouge View Post
                      Sesquipedalian - because brevity is preferable as a rule, as such NS can figure out the definition through opposites.
                      This one is my favourite word. Partly because it is so mellifluous, and partly because it is autological - it describes itself.

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                        #61
                        Originally posted by Balderdasha View Post
                        Also, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is the fear of long words. Whoever named that disorder must have been a real arse mustn't he?
                        Akin to dyslexia being hard to speak.

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                          #62
                          And lisp having an 's'.

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                            #63
                            And rhotacism beginning with an 'R'.

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                              #64
                              And Jeremy Hunt

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