they simple shine there.

corruscating, murmuration, and their ilk are great friends of mine.

but ichor—ichor is to laugh!

jane

Yes, it’s highly contextual. All words are naturally good, but they can fall into bad company, and sometimes we need to get the poor dears out of their usual haunts for the benefit of all.

“See” and “look” are, at heart, stalwart salt-of-the-earth types, but after reading dozens of closing epiphanies headlined by “See:” or “Look:”, I wish they could be banished from poetry for a few decades.

On the other hand, I can imagine Stephen Colbert deploying “crepuscular” and “effulgence” very successfully. Together, even.

richard: i’m with you on ‘crepuscular’, but i don’t think it’s as widely used as some of the others. add it anyway justine. the more the merrier!

excuse me, are we writing or doing crossword puzzles here?

There are lots of ways to describe this, and quickly too. Howard waldrop reckons there are [insert bazillionish number here] ways to describe something wrongly, but there is only one way to describe it right—i’ll take it to mean, so that the whole description shines and sings, not just the sing-y word in the middle of the description.

USians using “whilst” makes Baby Cthulhu cry…

Love all the badinage, but I hear the teakettle ululating atop the stove and I must fly!

Except me and thee. And most of the time, people assume I’m serious.

Noted on your T-shirt size.

Adding “pellucid” to the list!

Yes, most of the ‘-escent’ suffixed words get the sword – opalescent, luminescent, tumescent.

Thanks for pointing out the jesting light, justine; things are getting positively hostile over at ebear’s blog. People railing about ‘these dogmatic lists’ – this is so not a dogmatic list! It’s not even a list of words I don’t like or have never used myself. This is a list of words that I’ve seen used so badly, so often, that I’ve now got an instinctive wince reaction when I see them.

Anyone who’s heard me talking about this list will know that it’s a species of joke. I’ve considered blogging about it before this; I’m thinking it was probably a good idea not to…

I like candra’s comment: “maybe there are words that are okay to exist but not to use”. Sometimes I think these “forbidden” words are words that have a lot of power, and people use them without knowing how to fully control – or fully release – that power. I just want them used so that they don’t stick out of their paragraphs like sore and self-conscious thumbs.

obsidian mael
stroms

roiling with
iridescence

amongst the jasmine
ululations”

LOVE it!

so much depends
upon

obsidian mael
stroms

roiling with
iridescence

amongst the jasmine
ululations

I always used to notice Stephen Donaldson’s overuse of roiling, chiaroscuric, fuliginous, and other words like that!

jasmine also means a specific thing, a name or a flower or a scent. where i grew up it was very often used to make garlands. again, one might as well ban “rhododendron.”

ditto obsidian, though I agree that it should only be used to describe the rock.

maelstrom is also a very nice word.

the others are a bit pretentious, but should be fair game for comic writing. i am now looking for an excuse to use ululating in a sentence. “The car alarm wouldn’t shut off, and now all the neighbor’s cats were ululating.”