Word of the day: ekphrasis
I recall sitting in an NEH seminar and being told that if one wanted to befuddle colleagues, all that was necessary was to speak the word ekphrasis. Well, maybe. I’m not so sure.
Iambic beer?
For the splittest of seconds, I misread a word in the definition for “Kriek,” the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day.
The passing show
Coined by Alexander Pope.
Word of the day: eremite
Someone piped up: “What’s Eremite?” And the teacher explained that it was an element Keats had discovered.
Word of the day: cento
The cento is dear to readers of modern and postmodern poetry.
Word of the day: magnifico
“Magnifico” is another word that I associate with a particular work of literature: the Wallace Stevens poem “Metaphors of a You-Know-What.”
Word of the day: opusculum
For readers of modern poetry, opusculum will recall Wallace Stevens’s poem “Study of Two Pears.”
Word of the day: iridescent
“Iridescent” brings to my mind two bits of poetry.
Poems, "made of words"
William Carlos Williams: "Poems are not made of thoughts, beautiful thoughts. It's made of words, pigments, put on. Here, there, made, actually."
Ashbery Ashberies
"Ashbery" as a verb
Guerdon
The winning word from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, in Hart Crane's The Bridge
The kitchen shink
Harold Bloom finds meaning in what I think is a typo.
Trompe l'oeil
3703 students: From the wordsmith.org word-a-day service: trompe l'oeil (tromp lye) noun 1. A style of painting in which objects are render...
Gregory Corso and words
Here's the poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001) on his love of words: See, I know words--beautiful words from the past that people don't know, and...