There is a word for that!

pareidoliacal revelations often come to me in the shower while i'm contemplating no god

the mongrel always calls when i'm in the shower

Cool. How would you use it in a sentence?

Don't overexert Wandel, he's just learned of the word.

apophenia - I did a lot of that when I was on an archeological dig a couple of decades ago.

The so-called "Bible Code" is an example of apophenia. Using equidistant letter sequences in Genesis some claim to have found predictions of modern day events such as political assassinations, catastrophes, epidemics, etc.

Words fail me. I'm still trying to figure out why there is no word for the 2nd person singular pronoun in English. Most other languages have it.

Popple is cool!





(Can also mean poplar.)



And German is to be congratulated (or condemned?) for Schadenfreude:

I can be a very verbose person at times, mostly when I don't need the words. When I need the words to make me not sound like a bumbling idiot is when words fail me, or should I say I fail at words.

If you come across an interesting word that expresses something unusual or complex, please post it on this thread.

Dlowan provided us with a couple of interesting examples.

Oolungteasup mentioned "pareidoliacal" which refers to behavior similar to apophenia.

I don't know if it's "unusual" or not, but "rebranding" oneself seems to be popular, whether you are a business or person. It simply means updating or reinventing yourself or your business plan.

Is this some kind of obscure joke?

Second person singular pronouns: subjective=thou; objective=thee; possessive=thy, thine.

I have
Thou hast
He, she, it hath

It's not used any longer, but believe me, there is one, and it was used as recently as the nineteenth century. Members of the Society of Friends ("Quakers") used it until quite late in the nineteenth century, at which point, i suppose, they gave themselves a dispensation for it.

It was traditionally used in addressing the deity ("My Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?"), and, at least technically, ought to have been used to address the monarch in English, just as would have been the case in French. The problem the Normans ran into, is that the Anglo-Saxon used the second person singular in it's intuitive sense--to address another individual directly. So, to make distinction, which distinction was considered important by the ascendancy, they required people to address members of the baronage with the second person plural.

The Society of Friends adopted its used from the beginning, in the 17th century, as evidence of leveling. The common people still addressed one another with the second person singular, so "Quakers" addressed everyone, including members of the baronage, that way. They continued the usage long after the everyday use of the second person singular had been abandoned by every other English speaker.

It's very much derived from German

Ich habe
Du hast
Er, sie, es hat

Another issue mentioned by Setanta reminded me of the German practice of addressing someone as "Sie" instead of "Du":

That's my point.

Oh yeah? That certainly was not clear from your initial post.

Well, if something is no longer in use, then, for all practical purposes, it no longer exists in the language. At one time there was a second person singular. It no longer is.

one of my favourite characters in Neil Gaiman's comic book series The Sandman, is Delirium

in the story arc Brief Lives, she and her sibling dream (The Sandman) go on a quest to find a lost sibling Destruction, along the way Delirium makes a few comments and asks a few questions about words



Change. Change. Change. Change … change. Change. Chaaange. When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.
Delirium, in Sandman #41: "Brief Lives"

"What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?"
"There isn't one."
"Oh. I thought maybe there was."
Delirium and Dream, in Sandman #43: "Brief Lives"

"Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?"
"No."
Delirium and Dream, in Sandman #43: "Brief Lives"

"Um, what's the name of the word for things not being the same always? You know, I'm sure there is one. Isn't there? There must be a word for it … the thing that lets you know time is happening. Is there a word?"
"Change."
Delirium and Dream, in Sandman #43: "Brief Lives"

When I first came to work here at the Widget Factory, I could not understand
their use of the word "nominal". I'd only ever heard it used to mean "in name
only". But here we say a test's results were nominal, or a mission flew
nominally when everything went as expected. One doesn't say OK because
that implies there were no errors. Nominal means there may have been errors,
but none that were unexpected.

Petrichor: the pleasant smell that often accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions.