# Words
Ten a week. Some new, some old ones I keep bending out of shape. Newest batch on top.
**How this works:** the cards up top are face down. Turn one for the word, turn it again for the meaning, a third time puts it back. Each week ten words come out of the drawer and onto the table as entries: a one-line definition, the origin, the trap (where I tend to spin the meaning), and one sentence I would say out loud. Words I already own but misuse go in under the same header, marked reinforce. The Sheet at the bottom is the drawer: every word, with the week it went on the table, blank if it is still waiting.
## Week 38 · 2026
> [!word]- **argot** · noun
> the private slang of a group, built to keep outsiders out.
> **Origin:** Fr. *argot*, originally the name of the Paris beggars' guild. Root unknown, which suits it.
> **Trap:** jargon is technical and public. Argot is social and closed. Engineers have jargon; a team that has been through a bad quarter together has argot.
> **Use:** Every standup has an argot. Six months in and I still cannot tell which acronyms are real.
> [!word]- **ersatz** · adj
> a substitute standing in for the real thing, usually a worse one.
> **Origin:** Ger. *Ersatz*, replacement. Entered English through two wars of coffee made from acorns.
> **Trap:** it means inferior substitute, never fake. Ersatz coffee is still coffee-shaped and drinkable, just sad.
> **Use:** The demo ran on ersatz data. Real enough to click, fake enough that nobody asked a second question.
> [!word]- **apotropaic** · adj
> meant to ward off evil.
> **Origin:** Gk. *apotrepein*, to turn away. The same "turn" as in tropic and heliotrope.
> **Trap:** it describes the object's job, never its power. A horseshoe is apotropaic whether or not it works.
> **Use:** The runbook is apotropaic. Nobody has read it, and the outage has not come back.
> [!word]- **antiphonal** · adj
> sung or spoken in alternation, one side answering the other.
> **Origin:** Gk. *anti*, in return, plus *phone*, voice. The antiphon is the church version, two choirs trading lines.
> **Trap:** it needs two parties answering each other. An echo is a repeat. A call and response is antiphonal.
> **Use:** The design review turned antiphonal. Engineering sang a line, product sang it back a half step lower.
> [!word]- **propinquity** · noun
> nearness, in place or in kin, and the pull that comes with it.
> **Origin:** L. *propinquus*, near, from *prope*. Cousin of approach and approximate.
> **Trap:** it is nearness plus consequence. Proximity is a measurement. Propinquity is why the two desks by the coffee machine ended up dating.
> **Use:** Propinquity built the Bay Area. Everyone was within a bike ride of everyone else's bad idea.
> [!word]- **shibboleth** · noun
> a word or habit that marks who belongs, and gives away who does not.
> **Origin:** Heb. *shibboleth*, ear of grain. In Judges 12 the Gileadites used it as a password because the Ephraimites could not say the sh.
> **Trap:** the modern drift is "outdated slogan". The sharper sense is the test itself, the word you cannot fake.
> **Use:** Pronouncing the product name right is our shibboleth. Two syllables and you are in, three and you are a vendor.
> [!word]- **telos** · noun
> the end something is for, its built-in purpose.
> **Origin:** Gk. *telos*, end, goal. Teleology is the study of it.
> **Trap:** it is the purpose, never the deadline. A project has a due date and a telos, and the two rarely agree.
> **Use:** The telos of a dashboard is a decision. Most of ours have a telos of being looked at.
> [!word]- **uxorious** · adj
> excessively fond of, or submissive to, one's wife.
> **Origin:** L. *uxor*, wife. The word has no husband-shaped twin, which tells you who was writing the dictionaries.
> **Trap:** it is always a bit of a jab. Devoted is the compliment, uxorious is the raised eyebrow.
> **Use:** He turned uxorious the week they got the dog. Every calendar hold now says "checking with home."
> [!word]- **mollify** · verb
> soften someone's anger, calm them down.
> **Origin:** L. *mollis*, soft. Same root as mollusk, a soft thing in a shell.
> **Trap:** you mollify a person, you assuage a feeling. And mollifying is a patch. The complaint is still true afterward.
> **Use:** The release note mollified the customer. The bug mollified nobody.
> [!word]- **verlan** · noun
> French back-slang that flips the syllables of a word: femme becomes meuf.
> **Origin:** Fr. *l'envers*, the reverse, itself flipped. The name is the first example.
> **Trap:** it is a system, never a single word. One flipped word is a joke. A vocabulary of them is verlan.
> **Use:** The team has a verlan for every feature name. Half the roadmap is only legible backwards.
## Week 37 · 2026 · reinforce
> [!word]- **tenuous** · adj
> thin, slight, barely holding on.
> **Origin:** Latin *tenuis*, thin. Cousin of tender, attenuate, extenuate.
> **Trap:** it describes the grip, never the truth. A tenuous link is thin, still possibly real.
> **Use:** The link between the roadmap and the demo was tenuous. One good question and it would have snapped.
> [!word]- **verdure** · noun
> lush green growth, and the greenness itself.
> **Origin:** Old French *verd*, green, from Latin *viridis*. Verdant is the adjective.
> **Trap:** it is the green, never a single plant. A hillside has verdure. A fern has leaves.
> **Use:** The hills went brown by June. Verdure in California is a rumor that lasts about ten weeks.
> [!word]- **supercilious** · adj
> haughty, looking down on people with a raised eyebrow.
> **Origin:** Latin *supercilium*, eyebrow. A facial expression frozen into an adjective.
> **Trap:** superior is the rank. Supercilious is the attitude about the rank.
> **Use:** The onboarding bot answered with a supercilious calm, as if it had been expecting someone smarter.
> [!word]- **conniving** · adj
> scheming, quietly cooperating in something shady.
> **Origin:** Latin *connivere*, to close the eyes, to wink. To connive was to look away on purpose.
> **Trap:** the old sense is complicity by pretending to see nothing. The modern sense is active plotting. Both survive, and the old one is sharper.
> **Use:** Two teams, one budget, and a conniving spreadsheet that somehow favored whoever opened it last.
> [!word]- **susurrus** · noun
> a whispering, rustling sound.
> **Origin:** Latin *susurrus*, a murmur. Imitative. Say it and you hear it.
> **Trap:** it is a sound, never a mood. A room can have a susurrus. A person cannot feel one.
> **Use:** The server room had a susurrus of fans, the closest thing the building had to wind.
> [!word]- **abortive** · adj
> cut short before it produced anything.
> **Origin:** Latin *aboriri*, to disappear, to miscarry. Same root as orient, rising.
> **Trap:** it carries no moral weight. An abortive attempt simply failed to arrive.
> **Use:** Three abortive attempts at a morning run, each ending at the coffee shop on the corner.
> [!word]- **capitulate** · verb
> surrender on agreed terms.
> **Origin:** Latin *capitulum*, little head, a heading in a document. To capitulate was to draw up terms under headings.
> **Trap:** it implies terms and a signature. Losing an argument is a loss. Conceding with conditions is capitulating.
> **Use:** I capitulated on the naming convention. Terms: they own the label, I own the definition.
> [!word]- **assuage** · verb
> make an unpleasant feeling less intense.
> **Origin:** Latin *ad* + *suavis*, sweet. To sweeten something bitter.
> **Trap:** you assuage a feeling, never a person. Assuage the fear, comfort the friend.
> **Use:** A green dashboard assuages nothing. It moves the worry to whoever wrote the query.
> [!word]- **cartouche** · noun
> an oval frame around a royal name in hieroglyphs, or any ornamental frame or scroll.
> **Origin:** French for cartridge, from Italian *cartoccio*, a paper cone. Napoleon's soldiers thought the ovals looked like ammunition.
> **Trap:** it is the frame, never the name inside it.
> **Use:** Every logo is a cartouche. An oval around a name that wants to outlive the people who chose it.
> [!word]- **mea culpa** · noun
> an admission of one's own fault.
> **Origin:** Latin, "through my fault", lifted from the Confiteor prayer.
> **Trap:** it already means "my fault", which makes "my mea culpa" a double. Issue one, offer one, open with one.
> **Use:** The postmortem opened with a mea culpa and closed with a Jira ticket. Progress.
> [!word]- **kruvojaden (кръвожаден)** · adj
> bloodthirsty.
> **Origin:** Bulgarian *кръв*, blood, plus *жаден*, thirsty. Literal, the way the best compounds are.
> **Trap:** *жаден* on its own also means greedy, which gives the word appetite as well as violence.
> **Use:** The Q4 targets read kruvojaden. Someone in finance has an appetite.
## Sheet
Every word, one line each. Week is the batch it went on the table; blank means it is still in the drawer.
| Word | Pos | Meaning | Root | Week |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :---: |
| abortive | adj | cut short before it produced anything | L. *aboriri*, to miscarry | 37 |
| agora | noun | the open market and meeting square of a Greek city | Gk. *agora*, gathering place | |
| alacrity | noun | brisk, cheerful readiness | L. *alacer*, lively | |
| amble | verb | walk at an easy, unhurried pace | L. *ambulare*, to walk | |
| ameliorate | verb | make better or more bearable | L. *melior*, better, via Fr. | |
| amity | noun | friendship between people or nations | L. *amicus*, friend | |
| ancillary | adj | supporting, subordinate to the main thing | L. *ancilla*, maidservant | |
| antiphonal | adj | sung or spoken in alternation, one side answering the other | Gk. *anti* + *phone*, answering voice | 38 |
| apotropaic | adj | meant to ward off evil | Gk. *apotrepein*, to turn away | 38 |
| argot | noun | the private slang of a group, built to keep outsiders out | Fr. *argot*, the beggars' guild | 38 |
| assuage | verb | make an unpleasant feeling less intense | L. *ad* + *suavis*, sweet | 37 |
| austere | adj | severe and plain, stripped of comfort | Gk. *austeros*, harsh, dry | |
| capitulate | verb | surrender on agreed terms | L. *capitulum*, heading | 37 |
| carte blanche | noun | full freedom to act as one sees fit | Fr., blank card | |
| cartouche | noun | an oval frame around a name, or any ornamental frame | It. *cartoccio*, paper cone, via Fr. | 37 |
| congeries | noun | a heap or jumble of things collected together | L. *congerere*, to carry together | |
| conniving | adj | scheming, quietly cooperating in something shady | L. *connivere*, to wink | 37 |
| contrite | adj | sorry and remorseful for a wrong | L. *contritus*, ground down | |
| conveyance | noun | the carrying of something, or the vehicle or legal transfer that does it | OFr. *conveier*, to accompany on the way | |
| dative | noun | the grammatical case of the indirect object, the one given to | L. *dare*, to give | |
| despotic | adj | ruling with absolute, arbitrary power | Gk. *despotes*, master of the house | |
| didactic | adj | meant to teach, often too obviously | Gk. *didaskein*, to teach | |
| discursive | adj | rambling from topic to topic | L. *discurrere*, to run about | |
| enmity | noun | deep, settled hostility | L. *inimicus*, enemy, via OFr. | |
| epimeletic | adj | relating to care-giving behavior, especially toward the young or sick | Gk. *epimeleia*, care | |
| epochal | adj | marking a new era | Gk. *epoche*, a fixed point in time | |
| ersatz | adj | a substitute standing in for the real thing, usually a worse one | Ger. *Ersatz*, replacement | 38 |
| evince | verb | show clearly, make evident | L. *evincere*, to prove | |
| extol | verb | praise highly | L. *extollere*, to lift up | |
| fatuous | adj | smugly, blandly foolish | L. *fatuus*, foolish | |
| fungible | adj | interchangeable, one unit as good as another | L. *fungi vice*, to take the place of | |
| gestalt | noun | a whole that reads as more than its parts | Ger. *Gestalt*, shape, form | |
| gish gallop | noun | a debate tactic of firing off more claims than can be answered | Eng., coined 1994 after Duane Gish | |
| hale | adj | healthy and strong, especially in old age | OE. *hal*, whole | |
| harangue | noun | a long, loud, scolding speech | It. *aringa*, public address, via Fr. | |
| hedonistic | adj | devoted to pleasure | Gk. *hedone*, pleasure | |
| helter-skelter | adv | in disorderly haste | Eng., rhyming reduplication, 16th c. | |
| incipient | adj | just beginning to exist | L. *incipere*, to begin | |
| indelible | adj | impossible to remove or forget | L. *delere*, to destroy, negated | |
| indolent | adj | lazy, avoiding effort | L. *in* + *dolere*, to feel pain (first sense: painless) | |
| innocuous | adj | harmless, inoffensive | L. *nocere*, to harm, negated | |
| insipid | adj | flavorless, dull | L. *sapere*, to taste, negated | |
| internecine | adj | destructive to both sides, especially within one group | L. *internecinus*, murderous | |
| kruvojaden (кръвожаден) | adj | bloodthirsty | Bulg. *кръв* + *жаден*, blood-thirsty | 37 |
| lachrymose | adj | tearful, given to weeping | L. *lacrima*, tear | |
| lagrangian point | noun | one of five spots where two bodies' gravity and orbit balance, letting a third sit still | Eng., after Lagrange, 1772 | |
| languid | adj | slow, weak, lacking energy | L. *languere*, to be faint | |
| limn | verb | depict in words or paint, outline | L. *luminare*, to illuminate a manuscript | |
| limpid | adj | perfectly clear, as water or prose | L. *limpidus*, clear | |
| loquacious | adj | very talkative | L. *loqui*, to speak | |
| mea culpa | noun | an admission of one's own fault | L., through my fault | 37 |
| messianic | adj | relating to a savior figure, or fervently sure one is coming | Heb. *mashiah*, anointed | |
| mollify | verb | soften someone's anger, calm them down | L. *mollis*, soft | 38 |
| morose | adj | sullen and gloomy | L. *morosus*, peevish | |
| myopic | adj | nearsighted, lacking foresight | Gk. *myein* + *ops*, shut eye | |
| nadir | noun | the lowest point | Ar. *nazir*, opposite (of the zenith) | |
| neologism | noun | a newly coined word or usage | Gk. *neos* + *logos*, new word | |
| nonpareil | adj | without equal | Fr. *non pareil*, not equal | |
| oblique | adj | slanting, or indirect | L. *obliquus*, slanting | |
| parsimonious | adj | stingy, sparing to a fault | L. *parcere*, to spare | |
| perigee | noun | the point in an orbit nearest Earth | Gk. *peri* + *ge*, near earth | |
| placid | adj | calm, undisturbed | L. *placere*, to please | |
| plangent | adj | loud, resonant, and mournful | L. *plangere*, to beat the breast | |
| pliant | adj | bending easily, easily influenced | L. *plicare*, to fold | |
| polysemic | adj | having several meanings | Gk. *poly* + *sema*, many signs | |
| portent | noun | a sign of something momentous to come | L. *portendere*, to foretell | |
| propinquity | noun | nearness, in place or in kin, and the pull that comes with it | L. *propinquus*, near | 38 |
| pugnacious | adj | eager to fight | L. *pugnare*, to fight | |
| replete | adj | well stocked, full to the brim | L. *replere*, to fill again | |
| repudiation | noun | a flat rejection or disowning | L. *repudium*, divorce | |
| schmaltzy | adj | excessively sentimental | Yid. *shmalts*, rendered fat | |
| sedition | noun | speech or action inciting rebellion | L. *seditio*, a going apart | |
| shibboleth | noun | a word or habit that marks who belongs, and gives away who does not | Heb. *shibboleth*, ear of grain | 38 |
| sine qua non | noun | the thing without which something cannot be | L., without which not | |
| skeuomorph | noun | a design element imitating an older material or mechanism it no longer needs | Gk. *skeuos* + *morphe*, vessel form | |
| slake | verb | satisfy a thirst or desire | OE. *slacian*, to slacken | |
| solicitous | adj | anxiously attentive to someone's needs | L. *sollicitus*, agitated | |
| spite house | noun | a building put up to annoy a neighbor | Eng., 19th c. American | |
| supercilious | adj | haughty, looking down on people with a raised eyebrow | L. *supercilium*, eyebrow | 37 |
| susurrus | noun | a whispering, rustling sound | L. *susurrus*, a murmur | 37 |
| sycophant | noun | a flatterer who serves the powerful | Gk. *sykophantes*, fig-shower, origin disputed | |
| telos | noun | the end something is for, its built-in purpose | Gk. *telos*, end, goal | 38 |
| tenuous | adj | thin, slight, barely holding on | L. *tenuis*, thin | 37 |
| turbid | adj | cloudy with stirred-up sediment | L. *turba*, turmoil | |
| uxorious | adj | excessively fond of, or submissive to, one's wife | L. *uxor*, wife | 38 |
| vacuous | adj | empty of thought or meaning | L. *vacuus*, empty | |
| vapid | adj | flat, lifeless, without zest | L. *vapidus*, flat (of wine) | |
| verdure | noun | lush green growth, and the greenness itself | OFr. *verd*, green | 37 |
| verlan | noun | French back-slang that flips the syllables of a word | Fr. *l'envers*, the reverse, flipped | 38 |
| vernal | adj | of spring | L. *ver*, spring | |
| vociferous | adj | loudly and insistently vocal | L. *vox* + *ferre*, to carry the voice | |
| wanton | adj | reckless and cruel, or unrestrained | ME. *wantowen*, undisciplined | |
| yen | noun | a strong craving | Cantonese *yan*, craving; no relation to the currency | |