Interesting Words

I've frequently bored my blog readers to death with my fascination with words. And here I go again! Take it as your Friday penance!

Recently I've started keeping a notebook of interesting words. I've done this for two reasons:

1) Because I love interesting words, mostly for their aesthetic value-- "aesthetic" understood as a combination of sound and sense.

2) Because of the gargantuan, colossal, extraordinary amount of time we spend in limbo, doing nothing in particular. Taking the lift, and waiting for the lift. Walking down corridors. Waiting for buses. Waiting for meetings to begin. The US military has a saying I like, and that I find applies to much of life: "Hurry up and wait". So I like to carry notebooks with which I might, possibly, improve my mind while hurrying up and waiting. (Quickly looking in a notebook seems respectable no matter what you're doing. It appears official and diligent. As opposed to browsing your phone.)

How many of these words did you know, and do you have any other suggestions? (Guidelines follow the list.) Please tolerate my approximate definitions and correct them if they're wrong. There's a good few architectural terms at the start.

Symploce: A figure of speech in which the middle of a phrase is changed while the beginning and end stay the same, e.g., "Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley deep enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep me from you..."

Apse: The rounded end of a cruciform church where the altar is.

Architrave: The lintel of a row of column capitals.

Ashlar: Masonry that is finely cut and symmetrical.

Cantilever: A structural element attached to a fixed structure at one end, unsupported at the other. I'm glad I know what this means now as I've been hearing it all my life and felt stupid.

Clerestory: The upper part of a nave of a large church, containing windows.

Dentil: A small block used as a repeating motif in a cornice.

Heliograph: An early form of photography using bitumen. Used to create the first surviving photograph. (I wrote a poem about that photograph in my teens, and I still find the idea poetic.)

Calotype: Early photographic process that used paper.

Corral: A "slot" in a race (like a marathon), so that people begin at times commensurate with their ability.

Aspect ratio: The proportion of a movie picture's width and height.

Foot lambert: A unit used to measure luminescence on a movie screen.

Pop-o-matic: That plastic bubble in the centre of a board game that contains dice, and that you press to roll them. (I'm particularly fond of this word.)

Transom: The beam between the door and the pane of glass (or panel of wood?) above the door. The glass above it is called a "transom light" in the USA and a fanlight in British English. 

I know this word mostly from the movie This is Spinal Tap, in which the lead singer says: "Before I met Jeanine, my life was cosmically a shambles. I was using bits and pieces of whatever Eastern philosophies happened to drift through my transom."

Dewar: Name of a particular sort of flask and also the container in which cryonically preserved people are preserved (upside down, since the theory is that their heads will be preserved longer that way if there's a power-cut). Named after a Scottish guy called Dewar.

Non-rhotic: Languages, dialects and accents that only pronounce "r" when it comes before a vowel.

Cornea: The transparent "windshield" over your eye. Probably everybody knew that apart from me, right?

Sclera: The white of the eye.

Conjuctiva: The delicate tissue that lines the eyelids.  (Before we move on from eye-related terms...isn't the eye the most beautiful part of any human body?)

Hyperopia: Far-sightedness, the opposite of myopia.

Hue: In colour theory, one of the twelve basic colours of the colour wheel.

Chromaticity: In colour theory, the "purity" of a colour on the colour wheel. Measured by the presence of otherwise of black, white, or grey. (I'm not sure what that means exactly.)

Ferrule: The metal band on a paintbrush.

Emesis basin: A metal basin for holding medical instruments and also for puking into.

Debridement: Removing dead and infected tissue from a wound.

Alickadoo: A member of a sports club who isn't actually a player, just a hanger-on. Said to have been coined in Ireland. (I also particularly like this one.)

Mysophobia: A morbid fear of germs. (I personally wash my hands more often than almost anybody I know.)

Thaumatrope: A Victorian era toy or optical illusion. There are pictures on two sides of a disc and when the disc is spun fast enough, it looks like the images merge. Cool!

Zoetrope: Simple form of animation using a cylinder on a rotating wheel. I've watched videos of this and honestly I don't think it's all that impressive.

Theremin: Musical instrument that is played without being touched. Developed by some Soviet scientist. Most associated with "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys although that wasn't exactly a theremin but some kind of variation on the idea.

Krieg light: The big light they use on film sets.

Carcenet: A type of jewelled metal necklace from medieval times. I came across this while reading Idylls of the King by Tennyson. it's pronounced carkenet.

Diagetic: Something that exists within a fictional world. Most commonly music: diagetic music is music the characters can actually hear, as opposed to most film scores.

Libfix: A "liberated affix". Like the -gate in every scandal that was called -gate after Watergate, or like the -thon in telethon, walkathon, etc.

From that list, you probably have a good idea of the sort of words I'm looking for, but these are my basic principles:

1) It has to be a real word that has a real function, no matter how obscure or rare it might be. I'm not really interested in funny or whimsical words, although these seem to predominate in every "interesting words" list I can find. (The compilers of such lists have a particular love affair with "flibbertigibbet".)

2) I like words that are drawn from some particular field or specialty, such as (on this list) optics or film projection. But not so obscure that they would never be relevant for general usage.

3) I like somewhat extravagant names for inventions: Jumbotron, kaleidoscope (probably my favourite word of all), Pop-o-matic. (When I was a kid, I became acquainted with a machine called a ray-ionizer which supposedly purified the air.)

4) I like words with a bit of a Greek sound to them, like zoetrope and symploce.

That's about it. Don't forget, I'd be interested in hearing how many of these words people already knew, as well.