What words

February 7, 2006 2:28 PM

What's the opposite of a fysigunkus? (A.K.A. What words do you think look/sound really cool?)

Help me brainstorm a domain name!

I'm trying to come up with a domain name for a blog that I'm setting up that doesn't have a particular thematic focus, just general light-hearted analysis of the surrounding world. It will be about the joy of randomness and bizarre observation and cool facts that make you go "huh!" I want a domain name that captures that spirit of curiosity and the pursuit of new knowledge and wonderment at all the neat stuff that's out there. It doesn't have to have any meaning related to the blog, it can just be a name that's whimsical in its own right. Every good idea I've come up with has been snapped up by an evil linkfarm, and I'm stuck.

I love cool, weird, obscure, or quirky words. I love words derived from other languages that still have the flavor of their native language. I love words in other languages that have really unique meanings. I love phrases that convey a complex idea perfectly with very few words. This is the kind of stuff I've been brainstorming.

What words/phrases do you really like? What words/phrases always look or sound really cool when you come across them? What words/phrases make your inner linguist smile?

posted by TunnelArmr to writing & language (24 comments total)

From the very early days of the intarweb, you might want to peruse the Archive of Endangered, Special, and Fun Words.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:38 PM on February 7, 2006

I love the meaning of mamihlapinatapai, although it's probably not a good word to use for a URL you want people to easily remember. If you're feeling daring though...
posted by DyRE at 2:46 PM on February 7, 2006

A friend of mine just sent me her word of the day, borborygme. It's French, but it's pretty damn cool. Say it. Borborygme.
posted by emelenjr at 3:10 PM on February 7, 2006

The Superior Person's Book of Words and The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate are a couple of fun books for finding unusual words.

A quick perusal produces: lexiphanic, quisquous and usufruction.
posted by slogger at 3:10 PM on February 7, 2006

borborygmus in English - it means stomach rumble
posted by dmo at 3:17 PM on February 7, 2006

Great responses so far, thanks guys!

DevilsAdvocate: thanks for the link, that's one of the few unusual word archives I hadn't seen yet!

DyRE: that word is awesome! Even better, your link led me to this Wikipedia entry, which has more words like it. Hard to translate words are endlessly fascinating to me.

emelenjr: I assume that's a close relative of borborygmus, a favorite SAT word of mine, has a cool etymology too, similar to barbarian. Those greeks and their imitative words...

slogger: I actually already own The Highly Selective Thesaurus, along with the Highly Selective Dictionary of Golden Adjectives! I hadn't seen that first book though, thanks for the tip!
posted by TunnelArmr at 3:23 PM on February 7, 2006

On preview, what dmo said.
posted by TunnelArmr at 3:23 PM on February 7, 2006

I've always like the word Quixotic.
posted by Radio7 at 3:24 PM on February 7, 2006

rhizome has a nice ring to it
posted by eighth_excerpt at 4:11 PM on February 7, 2006

Done and done.

All available. All quirky.

I once asked Nick Denton (or one of my editors; I forget who I was talking to at the time) where they got the names for their blogs: Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, etc.

They said it was simply a matter of mashing real words or concepts with bizarre phonemes and just picking something that sounded cool, something people could spell, and something that wouldn't kill them to market.
posted by disillusioned at 4:12 PM on February 7, 2006

This is a slight aside, but i've always found the word "evening" to *perfectly* describe how the light changes after a sunset.

Think of it as even-ing and not eve-ning.

Which is why it's my favorite word.
posted by nathancaswell at 4:21 PM on February 7, 2006

"fandango" (used for the movie website) makes me wonder if focus tests were done to find a word that anyone could easily spell phonetically after hearing it once for the first time, and be assured of spelling it correctly in their browser.
posted by -harlequin- at 4:28 PM on February 7, 2006

A crossword dictionary and a list of international domain suffixes can be fun for coming up with a unique URL.

I wanted a short URL that wouldn't get truncated in email for the sole purpose of sending people files. I found one.
posted by nonmyopicdave at 4:38 PM on February 7, 2006

Yes, yes. Borborygme is the French equivalent for borborygmus, which sounds so much harder on the ears. I've been amusing myself saying borborygme in a creepy gutteral voice I somehow conjured up, resulting in an onomatopoetic effect.

Alas, I am eating dinner alone.
posted by emelenjr at 5:39 PM on February 7, 2006

infundibuliform
posted by 23skidoo at 8:18 PM on February 7, 2006

I always liked words that sounded opposite of what they meant, like pulchritude meaning beautiful.

Ubiquitous and obfuscate are routinely entertaining :-)

Consequently, I have invented "to squiptipadoogleboinkaflop" -- to make a remark revealing that one possesses the belief that a word must appear in either a dictionary one personally owns, has personally seen, or because of one's authority as knowing words, in order to be deemed legitimate -- whereas dicitionaries are just the reverse, a listing of words in current use based on usage presently, not a list of what is-and-is-not a word, like how a newspaper does not make the news but reports what happens. Reasons for this are usually because of some word game rule like Scrabble that disallows proper names, abbreviations, et cetera and gets transfered to life to imply that proper names are not real words. Dictionaries and etymology books merely report the definitions and alternate spellings of words as they have appeared throughout history, so some future dictionary could include Squiptipadoogleboinkaflop simply because it has been used once on Metafilter. I tried posting a wiki for it, but it got edited-out/deleted ;-P Go figure.

The very usage (whether in speech, print, cave dwelling and others) of a group of symbols or sounds or ideas to form an expressable concept, ever, makes a word a word, not because it has once appeared in some publication.

"One who thinks Blorange, one of many rhymes for Orange, doesn't count as a word because it's the proper name for a hill in the UK, has just squiptipadoogleboinkaflopped."
posted by vanoakenfold at 8:36 PM on February 7, 2006

PERSPICACITY

"The power to see or understand clearly; sharp-sightedness; insight."
posted by frogan at 8:47 PM on February 7, 2006

I got my domain name from splorp because it was perfect for me, but I had also compiled the following list which I presented in replacement to the domain world, and now present to you:

* http://shelfmademan.com
* http://hotkumquat.com
* http://fatui.com (from Ignes Fatui, something deluding or misleading, some gratuitious self-deprecation)
* http://aftercrosses.com ("after crosses and losses, men grow humbler and wiser"–Ben Franklin)
* http://diefasting.com ("he that lives upon hope will die fasting,” if you need a Goth feel perhaps)
* http://eyevocative.com
* http://parallaxblast.com

More along the lines of "phrases that convey" than "unique words" though.
posted by artifarce at 8:50 PM on February 7, 2006

Don't forget to mine past threads.
fricative, puissance, squid ink, euphony, garage door, vaporetto, lagniappe (which you'll want to spell LANyap, no doubt)
posted by rob511 at 9:05 PM on February 7, 2006

I like this one:

syzygy

An alignment of three celestial bodies (for example, the Sun, Earth, and Moon) such that one body is directly between the other two, such as an eclipse

It's generally used in other disciplines like math or psychology for independent parts coming together or communicating.
posted by tublecain at 11:00 PM on February 7, 2006

There's the old Czech tongue twister,



Which sounds roughly like:
/stRtsh pRst skRs kRk/, where each R is a rolled, voiced 'r' - which acts as a vowel in the language.
posted by sdis at 11:11 PM on February 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

I believe it means 'Stick your hand through your throat" or something to that effect
posted by sdis at 11:12 PM on February 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

I like mining sites like the Animal Diversity Web for neat bits of Latin, either because I like the species or what meaning it was derived from. Generally this takes some additional googling, but it's fun!

For example:
Sirenia, the order of Manatees and dugong, deriving from their being mistaken for mermaids (?) by early sailors.
posted by nelleish at 8:17 AM on February 8, 2006

I love it when a bunch of word nerds come together, the epeolatry in this thread makes me giddy! Thanks for all the great suggestions.
posted by TunnelArmr at 9:05 AM on February 8, 2006