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ARGH AM INCAPABLE OF DOING ANY WORK WHATSOEVER.

I need help to get enthused about words. What's your current favourite word and why do you like it?

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Leguminocomptiferous - Of, or appertaining to, the bean-counters.

I like accountants. Oh yes. Really, I do.

Counterintuitive - it just is.

Often used as a pejorative term, as in bad user interfaces on software; but the term encapsulates the delight in discovering that things really don't work the way that you thought they 'ought' to.

Spiral - partly because it's so foreign.

Do you get phases where a particular word in common usage sounds alien and unfamiliar? Maybe 'spiral' is having that kind of day. Or maybe it really is a strange and alien interloper from the world of mathematics. I like it for the associations, too: descent spiral (yay! astrogation!); cubic spiral (railway curves and road layouts); spiralling out of control; spider webs, fractals, the three-dimensional fibonacci series on Romanesca cauliflowers.

I am an geek. But I love words.

I have a love of spirals too, for many of the same reasons.

But yes, definitely, sometimes a common word gets disconnected from its meaning in my head and spends several days sounding like a silly, meaningless series of sounds. Especially when I've been using it a lot.

There ought to be a word for that.

“Desemantication”?

No. Sounds like spitting out something distasteful. And I've always seen 'semantics' as applying to sentences rather than to an individual words.

Romanesca cauliflowers have to be the world's most pleasing vegetable for geometry-geeks, and people like me who just find spirals and Fibbionaci sequences incredibly cool in an undefinable way.

Tasty, too.

Hopefully martling will be soon posting some photographs of a particularly baroque specimen that ewtikins had lying around in an urban smallholding she manages for a friend on holiday.

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