2/1/11

*wintry mix: I know it's two words. And I don't even like them. The phrase keeps coming up though, and every time it does, it makes me laugh. I wonder if that's an official meteorological term?

1/7/11
*redblue (from Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, a book I am currently reading): it was used to describe the lights that go along with a police siren. I liked how he combined the two colors into one word. It does seem like the lights go redblue, redblue, redblue.

12/8/10
*tesseract (from A Wrinkle in Time, a book I am currently reading): a four-dimension hypercube. In the novel it's a means of traveling to places you could not normally get to.

11/23/10

*umami: considered to be the fifth taste (others: salty, sweet, bitter, sour), and it is usually described as savoriness. It's kind of a hard word to explain to people, but I love the way it sounds. In Japanese the word literally means "deliciousness."

11/17/10

*ornithologist (from The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, a book I am reading): it means someone who studies birds. Actually, I think birds are kind of gross (maybe because I'm allergic to chicken?) but I still like the word because it's hard to say.

11/15/10

*sprinkling (from Ode to Salt): According to the dictionary, sprinkling means to scatter or spread out a small amount of something, like pepper or snow (or salt, I guess!). I like the word because it looks "spikey" and when I say it out loud it feels like I am sprinkling the word itself into the air.