My new word

[klwilliams]

The word for today is "solecism", via Joe Haldeman's blog. "Solecism" means, more or less, a word that is commonly misused, like using "schizophrenic" to mean having split personalities, when it really means have a mental break with reality so that you can't tell reality from your own illusions (more or less). Another example of a solecism that Joe used was "acronym". An acronym is the first letters of a phrase that can be pronounced and used as a word in the phrase's place, and is not the first letters of a phrase that are pronounced as letters to replace the phrase. For example, FUBAR, NATO, and LASER are acronyms. ATM, IBM, and HTML are not.

As Spock would say, "Fascinating."

Comments

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Ha ha.