Vituperating Thesaurus Diving with Scurrilous Excoriations

My desktop houses a rather unassuming file called words.txt. The file - without the fluff on Microsoft Word documents or even WordPad - functions as my own personal dictionary and thesaurus. At fewer than 40 words it's a poor representation of the English language, but it is a great cross section of strange words that have entered my possession through others' misuse or my own curiosity. Unfortunately, It seems lots of people like to finger through thesauruses without double-checking to make sure the words work. I have a great disdain for these thesaurus divers, even if their salvaged treasures fill my dictionary.

Thesaurus diving involves making a piece of writing pretentious ("grandiloquent" if you really will) by replacing common words with longer, rarer or obscure words. There's no problem using a thesaurus to sound a bit more poetic; sometimes blue is just a bit too blue and you need some azure or navy. The problem arises when blue heedlessly becomes something like beryl (beryl is a mineral, which is clear in its pure form, but can take on a multitude of colors).

So I'd like to share a couple of my words and their provenance as part of my dictionary ...No, not scurrilous words (don't ask me why I have so many synonyms for "using abusive, insulting language").


alimentary [al-uh-men-tuh-ree] - adjective
1. concerned with food, nutrition or digestion.
2. providing sustenance or nourishment; nutritious.

This one is fun because it works as a pun for elementary. "Why did the mouse die of starvation, Holmes?" - "It's alimentary, my dear Watson!" (never mind that Conan Doyle never had Sherlock Holmes say "elementary, my dear Watson" in 40 years of stories).


esurient [ih-soor-ee-uhnt] - adjective (esurience - noun)
1. craving food in great quantities; extremely hungry.
2. (often followed by "for") ardently or excessively desirous; greedy.

Not all of my words deal with food, I promise. Anyway, this word fell into my posession from a Monty Python skit involving a cheese shop. The main character played by John Cleese is a bombastic wordsmith and apparent cheese afficionado, and he brings up this rare synonym for hunger almost immediately - along with the more British-sounding "peckish," which makes a nice double entendre since it means hungry and/or irritated. Speaking of double meanings...


excoriate [ik-skawr-ee-eyt] - verb
1. to strip off or remove the skin from; to abrade (scrape off) skin or hide.
2. to denounce or berate serverely; to flay verbally; to censure scathingly.

Who says you don't learn anything watching sports? This word came up during the olympics, when one of the announcers mentioned a hockey coach was excoriating the team for their poor defensive maneuvers. This word is a bit strange etymologically. The core of the word is corium (that's right, I used core just before corium - take that, clarity!), which is Latin for "skin" so the first meaning is apparent, but the figurative meaning requires a bit more imagination.

(Alright there's food again, but that apple snuck into this picture, I swear!)

Double (and triple and quadruple) meanings are the great benefit of a diverse vocabulary. I've enjoyed them ever since mortally wounded Mercutio's pun in Romeo and Juliet: "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man." Even if Shakespeare's puns were originally an indulgence granted to the humors of the lower classes visiting the theatre. In case we're getting too low-class, next up we've got one of them, whosawhatsits...that's right, $10 words.


pulchritude [puhl-kri-tood] - noun
1. physical beauty - especially of a woman; that quality of appearance which pleases the eye; comeliness; grace; loveliness.
2. attractive moral excellence; moral beauty.

This pops up more often as my favorite word: pulchritudinous (a fancy, long way of saying beautiiful). I hear you say, "I've never seen it before, how much more often could it pop up?" Well, because most spam filters target things like "hot" or "beautiful" or "sexy," pulchritudinous tends to be the generic thesaurus treasure that comes in subject lines like "pulchritudinous Russian virggins redy 4 u."

Beautiful comes from Middle English and Old French, but pulchritudinous derives from fancy, civilized Latin. So how about some more Latin-derived words that are less nice?


scurrilous [skur-uh-luhs] - adjective
1. grossly or obscenely abusive language; vituperative.
2. given to the use of vulgar or coarse language; foul-mouthed.
3. characterized by or using low buffoonery; coarsely jocular or derisive; given to undignified joking as only a buffoon can warrant.

Okay, I lied when I said they weren't scurrilous words. One of the words is literally scurrilous.

I stole this from dinosaur comics, which uses it quite often. Whether or not it's actually being used correctly is arguable (T-Rex hadn't actually said anything mean or vulgar or jocular to warrant the devil's response). This one has fun double meaning since you can clandestinely imply someone is a foul-mouthed buffoon with a single word.


I believe that puts the site 2 years ahead in our "Word of the Year" program. Plus more people will hopefully use pulchritudinous, so my spam inbox won't seem quite so exotic.

I forgot to make a Thesaurus Rex joke, didn't I?