Wayne State University's Word Warriors program has released its 2024 list of delightfully descriptive words, and they are a feast for logophiles.
The laudable objective of the enterprise is to discover charming, oddly applicable words that have been lost to time, that definitely deserve a renaissance, and then try to reintroduce them to our day to day lexicon.
Among this year's successful nominations are:
curglaff (n): the shock when one plunges into cold water
rawgabbit (n): a person who speaks confidently but ignorantly
thunderplump (n): a heavy lashing of rain during a rainstorm
“There is something really nice about saying thunderplump, you know, as opposed to saying downpour rain,” says Christopher Williams, head of the Word Warriors Program. “It just conjures up a certain image and that’s what we want from these words,” Williams added. “It’s those perfect words to sprinkle into conversations to make their conversations and their writing so much more beautiful.”
“What these words do is add a certain poetry and I think it makes our conversation more beautiful, more interesting.”
This year marks the 15th annual Words Warrior List. The selected words are carefully chosen during the year before by public submissions on the program’s website and Facebook page.
From the entries, a new word is announced each week. “And throughout the year I monitor the engagement on that and I see which ones are getting traction,” Williams explained.
At the end of the year, 10 are chosen from the 52 or so words to carry into the coming year.
One of his favourite words from this year’s list is twankle. “It’s this idea of someone twanging absently in a musical instrument,” Williams said. “I love it because as soon as I hear the word twankle, I can think of someone sitting on their porch with a guitar or a banjo.”
Pawky, meaning to have a mockery or cynical sense of humour, first made its debut in conversations around 1640, according to Merriam-Webster, but four centuries later the word is also making a comeback after making it into the 2024 lineup.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the USA and at the other end of the 'words spectrum', Lake Superior State University in Michigan has continued its decades-long tradition of banishing a list of popular words from the previous year, and forbidding students to use them in 2024. Find out the 10 Words 'Banished' For 2024.