During the creation of my new scrabble-like word game, I realized that there are quite a few words that we think of as proper nouns, which have soundalike "regular" words.

For instance, most of know Shanghai can also be shanghai (verb: to force someone into doing something), but did you know Anna is also anna (noun: formerly used copper coins in Pakistan and India)?

There are a surprising number of words like this. And even though there are a lot of them in my game's dictionary I don't know how to find them all. I would love to know 2 things. Is there a word to describe these words? Also, is there a list of words like this that you know of?

As you can imagine for players of my game or Scrabble, knowing all of these would be very useful.

I need a word of admiration to explain how I feel about another Mom friend who I feel shares similar values, but neither of us are above one another. I don’t want to use the word admire even though I do admire her I feel like there’s a word out there that clarifies two people that naturally bounce off of each other in a positive direction.

How do I go about learning to... talk "fancily"? I want my sentences to have the same dumb energy that "FELICITATIONS, MALEFACTORS" have.

https://youtu.be/84HJWRjuHkw

We transfretate the Sequane at the dilucul and crepuscul: we deambulate by the computes and qua drives of the urb; we estimate the Latial verbocination; and like verisimilary amorabons,we captate the benevolence of the omnijugal, omniform, and omnigenal foeminine sex.

See here, you slack-salted transubstantiated interdigital germarium, you rantipole sacrosciatic rock-barnacle you, if you give me any of your caprantipolene paragastrular megalopteric jacitation, I’ll make a lamellibranchiate gymnomixine parabolic lepidopteroid out of you! What diacritical right has a binominal oxypendactile advoutrous holoblastic rhizopod like you got with your trinoctial ustilaginous Westphalian holocaust blocking up the teleostean way for, anyway! If you give me any more of your lunarian, snortomaniac hyperbolic pylorectomy, I’ll skive you into a megalopteric diatomeriferous auxospore! You queasy Zoroastrian son of a helicopteric hypotrachelium, you, shut your logarithmic epicycloidal mouth! You let this monopolitan macrocosmic helciform procession go by and wait right here in the anagological street. And no more of your hedonistic primordial supervirescence, you rectangular quillet-eating, vice-presidential amoeboid, either!

I dare you, fair readers (who have so recently critiqued my last post) to compare the following words and contrast them at the same time:

Tautologic Pleonastic

Demonstrate them in suitably defining sentences that illustrate their unique meanings. This is a challenge to all those who would have the audacity to really use the full strength of words...

As Emily Dickinson said, “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one and look at it until it begins to shine.”

Another word for ‘square’ as in “How do you square that with what you already know to be true?”

I was raised Mormon, and this sentence in Mormon scripture always stood out to me. Relevant part bolded; the rest is for context.

"And perhaps a committee can be appointed to find out these things, and to take statements and affidavits; and also to gather up the libelous publications that are afloat;and all that are in the magazines, and in the encyclopedias, and all the libelous histories that are published, and are writing, and by whom, and present the whole concatenation of diabolical rascality and nefarious and murderous impositions that have been practiced upon this people...." —Joseph Smith, Doctrine and Covenants 123:4-5

If you happen to be a writer, one of the great benisons of having children is that your personal culture-mine is equipped with its own canaries. As you tunnel on relentlessly into the future, these little harbingers either choke on the noxious gases released by the extraction of decadence, or they thrive in the clean air of what we might call progress....Surely if there's one thing we have to be grateful for it's that the web has put paid to such an egregious financial multiplier being applied to raw talentlessness. Put paid to it, and also returned musicians to the domain of live performance and, arguably, reinvigorated musicianship in the process....In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour.. The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk...." However, what didn't obtain is the current dispensation, wherein those who reject the high arts feel not merely entitled to their opinion, but wholly justified in it. It goes further: the hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance that conflates it with political elitism. Indeed, it's arguable that tilting at this papery windmill of artistic superiority actively prevents a great many people from confronting the very real economic inequality and political disenfranchisement they're subject to...Ours is an age in which omnipresent threats of imminent extinction are also part of the background noise — nuclear annihilation, terrorism, climate change. So we can be blinkered when it comes to tectonic cultural shifts. The omnipresent and deadly threat to the novel has been imminent now for a long time – getting on, I would say, for a century – and so it's become part of culture. During that century, more books of all kinds have been printed and read by far than in the entire preceding half millennium since the invention of movable-type printing. If this was death it had a weird, pullulating way of expressing itself....There is now an almost ceaseless murmuring about the future of narrative prose. Most of it is at once Panglossian and melioristic...The use of montage for transition; the telescoping of fictional characters into their streams of consciousness; the abandonment of the omniscient narrator; the inability to suspend disbelief in the artificialities of plot — these were always latent in the problematic of the novel form, but in the early 20th century, under pressure from other, juvenescent, narrative forms, the novel began to founder. The polymorphous multilingual perversities of the later Joyce, and the extreme existential asperities of his fellow exile, Beckett, are both registered as authentic responses to the taedium vitae of the form, and so accorded tremendous, guarded respect – if not affection...Now film, too, is losing its narrative hegemony, and so the novel — the cultural Greece to its world-girdling Rome — is also in ineluctable decline...I was affronted, not so much by the money (although pro rata [proportionally] it meant I was being paid considerably less than I would have working in McDonald's), but by not receiving the sanctification of hard covers. The agent I consulted told me to accept without demur: it was, he said, nigh-on impossible for new writers to get published — let alone paid...In retrospect, the ending of the agreement was simply a localised example of a much wider phenomenon: the concertinaing of the textual distribution network into a short, wide pipe. It would be amusing to read the meliorism of the Panglosses if it weren't also so irritating...If you'll forgive a metaphoric ouroboros: it shouldn't surprise us that this is the convulsive form taken by the literary novel during its senescence; some of the same factors implicated in its extinction are also responsible for the rise of the creative writing programme; specifically a wider culture whose political economy prizes exchange value over use value, and which valorises group consciousness at the expense of the individual mind. Whenever tyro novelists ask me for career advice I always say the same thing to them: think hard about whether you wish to spend anything up to 20 or 30 years of your adult life in solitary confinement....nowadays many people who sign up for creative-writing programmes have only the dimmest understanding of what's actually involved in the writing life; the programme offers them comity and sympathetic readers for their fledgling efforts...The current resistance of a lot of the literate public to difficulty in the form is only a subconscious response to having a moribund message pushed at them.

source

First of all, thanks to /u/scykei for go-ahead to post and a link in the sidebar.

I started a sub I think would be of interest to many of you. Like /r/LexiconicPorn, /r/usages is for posts highlighting a specific word. It's focus is different in that "usages" isn't looking specifically for obscure words. Instead, "usages" is focused on words you come across in reading, with a premium on interesting passages, or lists of words from a single book. The entries are used to populate a wiki for the use of all mankind. And for content scraping opportunists.

I'm hoping to make it a sort of bookish chat place with the wiki being a valuable artifact as a side result - hope you'll come by and have a look & drop off a contribution if you hit something fun in your reading.

Here's something pretty impressive if found when browsing one of the top posts in /r/logophilia.

"Eunoia" is a beautifully conceived book of poetry by Christian Bok, composed of five chapters each limited to words using on a single vowel.

From "A":

“Hassan can watch, aghast, as databanks at NASDAQ graph hard data and chart a NASDAQ crash - a sharp fall that alarms staff at a Manhattan bank. Hassan acts fast, ransacks cashbags at a mad dash, and grabs what bank drafts a bank branch at Casablanca can cash: marks, rands and bahts. Hassan asks that an adman draft a want ad that can hawk what canvas art Hassan has (a Cranach, a Cassatt and a Chagall).”

From "O":

“Scots from hogtowns or cowtowns work from cockcrow to moondown -- to chop down woodlots, to plow down cornrows.”

From "U":

“Gulls churr; ducks cluck. Bulls plus bucks run thru buckrush; thus dun burrs clutch fur tufts. Ursus cubs plus Lupus pups hunt skunks. Curs skulk (such mutts lurk: ruff ruff). Gnus munch kudzu. Lush shrubs bud; thus church nuns pluck uncut mums. Bugs hum - buzz, buzz - dull susurrus gusts murmur hushful, humdrum murmurs; hush, hush. Dusk suns blush. Surf lulls us. Such scuds hurl up cumulus suds (Sturm und Druck) - furls unfurl: rush, rush; curls uncurl: gush, gush. Such tumult upturns unsunk hulls; thus gulfs crush us, - gulp! - dunk us; burst lungs succumb.”

-- /u/EyeAmerican

I think that's a fairly decent explanation.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunoia_(book)

You can apparently read the entire work for free online here: http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/eunoia/

There's even a free audiobook: http://www.ubu.com/sound/bok.html

It's really interesting and is definitely worth taking a look.