As for the words themselves, you may be surprised how many seeming impostors are OED members in good standing: cellarhood, flingee, happify (this one going back to the early 17th century), jive-ass, misdelight. You may wonder whether you need apricity (“the warmth of the sun in winter”) or impluvious (“wet with rain”) in your vocabulary, lovely though they are; you’ll likely be challenged to work mid-lenting, need-sweat, rue-bargain, shot-clog, wine-knight, grimthorpe, halfpennyworth, and rough music (these last three are verbs!) into your conversation. On the other hand, you may wonder how you ever did without pandiculation (“the act of stretching and extending the limbs, in tiredness or waking”) or prend (“a mended crack”) or ruffing (“the stomping of feet as a form of applause”).
The last page of the book is an advertisement for the OED. It could stand as the dictionary definition of “redundant.”
Related:
Year in Books: Word plays, The worst word, You say what?!, More 
- Year in Books: Word plays
Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that the Phoenix wrote about in 2008.
- The worst word
Then it happens: you look up at the TV screen and see Bono, the lead singer of U2, step up to the podium to accept a statuette for recording the Best Alternative Music album. "We shall continue to abuse our position," he says, "and fuck up the mainstream."
- You say what?!
When Professor Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof created the language called Esperanto in late-19th-century Poland, he envisioned a world unified under a lingua franca.
- Plain talk
Jesse Sheidlower, an editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary , an expert in slang, and the author of The F-Word , can't stop talking about fuck.
- Say what?
Good news for perplexed suburbanites: a new site called UnderstandRap.com lets experienced rap interpreters explain difficult urban slang to hip-hop neophytes.
- Rakim: Return of the King
As long as the Microsoft linguists who're responsible for updating Word are adding "Barack" and "Obama" to the spell-check dictionary, they should throw in "Rakim."
- A guzzler’s glossary
“Alcoholic” and “articulate” rarely appear in the same slurred sentence, but it’s high time they did.
- Men from Mars(eille)
“Un jour ou l’autre, parlera l’Europe marseillais” — “Sooner or later, Europe will speak Marseille.”
- French tickler
"The French language is perfect for talking about sex," muses hirsute Parisian singer and electronic-musician Sébastien Tellier.
- An education funding formula, hailed as a breakthrough, faces its critics
For years, Rhode Island was one of just two states in the union without a funding formula for its public schools. And then, for a time, it was the only state with that dubious dis-tinction.
- The borscht I kissed once...
When I was working at the Harraseeket Inn in Freeport, two housekeepers who didn't speak English but giggled a lot brought in a pot of their family's borscht for the employee meal. In the dark basement hall where the employees ate, I tasted serious family-secret-cooking.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Culture and Lifestyle, Language and Linguistics, Sam R. Johnson, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Language and Linguistics, Sam R. Johnson, Dictionaries and Lexicography, Hunter College, Ammon Shea, Less
