Julia, my team leader at work, spews out fancy words at me from time to time that I catch awkwardly on paper notes. Here are some of them from over the last three years:
eggcorn
affordance
frisson
C’est la vie
sewage Vs sewerage
stroppy
xenophobia
prescriptivist
smorgasbord
iconoclast
antipodean
logorrhea (ha ha)
logomania (ha ha ha)
incendiary
Luddite
bamboozle
crepuscular
peremptory
satisfice
assidious
sussed
iniquitous
recalcitrant
recidivism
commiserate
cogitation
flummox
decimate
Imagine working for someone who uses words like this in normal conversation!
I see. Apparently some definitions can only be found on the internet. Silly me, I was just using the handy-dandy New World Dictionary which sits next to my desk. I guess it takes an old dog time to learn new tricks!
Eggcorn is a word according to New Scientist
“DO YOU get “boggled down” trying to explain things in “lame man’s terms”? When the “chickens come home to roast” do you find yourself “cutting off your nose despite your face”? Do these errors make you want to “kill over and die”? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you have laid an eggcorn.”
Wikepedia page on eggcorn
Oh, and I looked up eggcorn and couldn’t find such a word. Maybe she meant acorn, the nut that falls from oak trees? Those are the bane of my springtime existence around here, trying to dig up the baby oak trees the squirrels have hidden all over my yard.
Wow, you keep track of them! That’s impressive. I’m a huge dictionary fan. When I come across words I don’t know, I will almost always look them up. (My kids avoid asking me what words mean, ’cause I’ll tell them, and them make them wait while I look it up in the dictionary to make sure I’ve explained it properly.) I have a pretty good working vocabulary, but there were several on that list I didn’t know, and a few my dictionary didn’t either.