Aug

30

Word Of The Week: August 30th, 2008

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

August 30, 2008 |

Sometimes a simple word just won’t do. Every once in a while I’d rather use a fancy twenty-dollar word than a worn-down two-bit one. And on occasion I just want to make the people around me stop and say, “What?” That’s why, instead of describing something like, say, an ice cream cone as “cone-shaped”, I like to pull a word out of my hat like infundibuliform, which basically means “cone-shaped”. It’s derived from the Latin infundere, meaning “to pour in”. Of course it’s not often that I have an excuse to say something is infundibuliform, although it is sometimes–okay, extremely rarely–used to describe some flowers. More frequently I have to settle for the shorter version, infundibulum, which just means “funnel” or “cone”. I get to use that when I go down the street to the ice cream place and say, “Yes, I’ll have a single scoop of Karamel Sutra, in an infundibulum, please.”


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Peptodismal on August 30, 2008 7:20 am

    This is a case where the “shorter, supposedly more concisely descriptive” term is actually longer than the simple phrase, “cone-shaped”. I’ll have the Cherry Garcia in the “inverted dunce cap”.

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