Petrichor

The smell of rain on the ground after a long dry spell.

Just lovely.

callipygous

A great word from Anu Garg’s Word of the Day.  Callipygous means having well-formed buttocks coming from the Greek meaning “beautiful ass.”  This is not to be confused with dasypygal, meaning having a hairy ass or steatopygia, meaning having a fat ass.  What a wonderful language the Greeks have.

Lorgnette

How wonderful to finally learn the name for these classic symbols of upperclass snootiness.  Unfortunately, I learned it one day too late for the Times’ Sunday Crossword.  These are hoity-toity glasses attached to a stick that stereotypical high society folks wear to the opera.

Tarn

A small, round mountain lake.  A tarn is featured prominently in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.”  It makes for a great Gothic devise for the sublime.

Tmesis

Anu Garg’s amazing word of the day meaning the insertion of a word into another.  For example: abso-fucking-lutly.

Circassian beauties

A seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideal of womanly beauty.  The Circassians are a Muslim people of the non-sovereign state of Adyghe in the North Caucasus.  Their women became famed for their beauty during the height of the Ottoman Empire when many of them served in the sultans harem.  Beauty products were sold with the Circassian name and P.T. Barnum began to feature supposed “Circassian beauties” in his sideshows to appeal to their oriental exoticism (his women were identifiable by their bushy hair reminiscent of 1970s afros that bore no resemblance to fact).

dialethea

A true contradiction.  Dialethiesm is the idea that some contradictions are actually true.  Take for example the famous Liar’s Paradox — “Everything I am saying is false.”  The New York Times recently had this article about the topic.

Cryptid

A cryptid is a creature whose existence is debated.  This covers a wide range of animals from the fantastical (yeti, chupacabra, Loch Ness monster) to the the questionable extinct (ivory-billed woodpecker), to animals living outside of their natural range (ABCs, or abnormally big cats of England).

The study of cryptids is cryptozoology.  The lessor studied field of cryptobotany studies plants (like the man-eating tree of South America).

Volte-face

A French word found in Qiu Xiaolong’s detective novel Red Mandarin Dress. It means a complete reversal or about face.

Cothurnal

From Anu Garg’s word of the day. all of this week’s words relate to terms originating to covering the extremities.

Corthunal means relating to tragedy. it comes from the sandals that Athenian tragic actors would wear on stage.