Words of the Week II

Noteworthy words that I encountered over the past week. Definitions from the OED unless otherwise stated.

Bathos: [rhetoric] Ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax.

• Depth; lowest phase, bottom. 

Mirth: Pleasurable feeling, enjoyment, gratification; joy, happiness. Often used of religious joy.

Panegyrize: To pronounce or write a panegyric or elaborate eulogy upon; to speak or write in praise of: to eulogize.

Amphiboly: A figure of speech: Ambiguity arising from the uncertain construction of a sentence or clause, of which the individual words are unequivocal: thus distinguished by logicians from equivocation, though in popular use the two are confused.

Dysphemism: The substitution of an unpleasant or derogatory word or expression for a pleasant or inoffensive one; also, a word or expression so used; opp. euphemism.

Patina: A film or incrustation produced by oxidation on the surface of old bronze, usually of a green colour and esteemed as an ornament. Hence extended to a similar alteration of the surface of marble, flint, or other substances.

• An acquired superficial covering or appearance, esp. one suggestive of age, a gloss;

Obsequious: Unduly or servilely compliant; ignobly submissive; manifesting or characterized by servile complaisance; fawning, cringing, sycophantic.

Sycophant: One who uses compliments to gain self-serving favor or advantage from another. [definition from wikitionary]

Ascetic: Of or pertaining to the Ascetics, or to the exercise of extremely rigorous self-discipline; severely abstinent, austere.

• One of those who in the early church retired into solitude, to exercise themselves in meditation and prayer, and in the practice of rigorous self-discipline by celibacy, fasting, and toil. 
• One who is extremely rigorous in the practice of self-denial, whether by seclusion or by abstinence from creature comforts. 

Trollop: An untidy or slovenly woman; a slattern, slut; also, sometimes a morally loose woman, a trull.

Ersatz: A substitute or imitation (usually, an inferior article instead of the real thing).

Curmudgeon: A crusty irascible cantankerous old person full of stubborn ideas [definition from the free dictionary app on my phone. I liked it more.]

1. Irascible: Easily provoked to anger or resentment; prone to anger; irritable, choleric, hot-tempered, passionate. 
2. Cantankerous: Showing an ill-natured disposition; ill-conditioned and quarrelsome, perverse, cross-grained.

Rapacious: Giving to grasping or taking for oneself; inordinately greedy

• Of animals: Subsisting by the capture of living prey; raptorial. 

Gestalt: A ‘shape’, ‘configuration’, or ‘structure’ which as an object of perception forms a specific whole or unity incapable of expression simply in terms of its parts

Dybbuk: In Jewish folk-lore, the malevolent spirit of a dead person that enters and controls the body of a living person until exorcized.

Idolum: An image or unsubstantial appearance; a spectre or phantom; a mental image, an idea.

• A false mental image or conception; a fallacy.