There were problems with page 23 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition. There were some cool words (which I’ll discuss), but I didn’t have enough resources to do a full definition. So we are stuck with: bastinado.

Beating Past Bastinado

The first word I wanted to use was “battologize.” It is “to repeat words or phrases excessively in speech or writing.” I suffer from this. It’s not just that; I also suffer from this. In fact, it gets so bad, that I sometimes suffer from this. But really: it’s easy to fall into that kind of thing. That’s why it’s important to at least read a piece of writing before publishing.

The second word I selected was “bavardage.” It means “foolish or nonsensical talk.” You would have thought that I would have known that word. It’s like the first word I remember learning: facetious. By the time I was four, the most common sentence my mother said to me was, “Don’t be facetious.” One day I asked her what it meant. Here’s the thing: I could tell it wasn’t good. But whenever she said it, I was feeling pretty damned good myself. Not much has changed over the last five decades.

I suppose I could complain about all the bathy- words on this page. But you know how I feel about that. So let’s move on to today’s word: bastinado.

There were really only two things on page 22 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition: barbiturate and barometer. Really: it was amazing. I understand barometer. It was all pressure related words. But it was remarkable how many words had to do with barbiturates. Just the same, that was a time when there was still memory of people dying a lot for them. Hail the benzodiazepines! But there were other words, so today’s is barcarole.

Barcarole and Beyond

There were some other interesting words beside barcarole, of course. For example: barghest. This is some kind of ghostly apparition that is supposed to be an omen of death. I have a curious relationship with death. I really don’t fear it. At the same time, I wonder how I would feel if I were staring it right in the face. I know that any freak-out that I experienced would just be genetic encoding. But it wouldn’t make it any less unpleasant. The point is that I wonder how I would react if a barghest appeared to me tonight. Probably okay. I’m most okay with death when I’m half asleep.

Anyway, enough of that. On to “barcarole.”

There were certainly a lot of weird words on page 21 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition! It’s not surprising that I didn’t know “balneal” and “balneology” since they have to do with bathing. But it is surprising that I didn’t know “bandog,” given my interest in people breading dogs to be vicious. But instead, I picked the word “baldachin.”

Baldachin Is Not Banal

On page 21 there was a word most literate people know well: banal. A question that has been much debated during my life is how this word should be pronounced. The fact that such a debate should stand out in my life certainly says much about the kind of life I’ve led. But up until I was in college, it never occurred to me that anyone would pronounce it other than “bənäl.” But no. There were lots of people who pronounced it “bānəl.”

What’s interesting is that with a hard-a, the word sounds rather aggressive. And the people who preferred it were quite aggressive on the matter. The people who preferred the more laid-back pronunciation tended to be more laid-back in general. “Banal” still strikes me as a laid-back word. If one wished to be aggressive, one would just exclaim, “Boring!” And that would be that.

The Dying Hard-A of Banal

Apparently, the whole hard-a “banal” is an American thing. Oxford doesn’t even mention that pronunciation in its definition of banal. But even Merriam-Webster lists this pronunciation third — with “loser” in parentheses after it. (I’m just kidding about the “loser” part.) My bet is that this pronunciation is falling out of favor because it just sounds silly.

Anyway, enough of that. On to “baldachin.”

How uninspiring was page 20 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition! Over a quarter of it was given over to bacteria related words: bactericide, bacteriology, bacteriolysis, bacteriophage, bacterioscopy, bacteriostasis, bacteriostat, bacteroid, and bacteroides. I won’t insult your intelligence by defining any of them for you. But it does rather make me wish I had become a bacteriologist. I’m really not that interested in bacteria, and maybe it is best to go into a field that you don’t much care about. Lay bare the meaning of life — or lack thereof.

More Grammar: Bahuvrihi

The word I’ve picked for today is one that relates to my chosen profession: bahuvrihi. But I didn’t pick it because I was terribly interested in it. It’s just that the two other words I found more interesting didn’t have as much information available. The first was “baculine.” That is an adjective that relates to the cane or rod used to beat people — usually children — as punishment. I’ve always found that kind of fascinating given that I was not beaten as a child. A raised eyebrow was generally enough to get me hiding under the bed. But if not, yelling certainly worked.

The second word was “bagatelle.” That one would have been fun because the book provides three different definitions: an unimportant triffle; a short, light piece of music; and a game that is like billiards played on an oblong board. This is indicative of specialized words. They lose much of their power when they are thusly ghettoized. Poor bagatelle!

So we are left with a little linguistics: bahuvrihi.

We have arrived on page 19 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition. And that means we have reached the Bs! I’m all done with the As. Just 25 more letters to go! Today’s B word is: bacchanal.

Bacchanal is an odd word in the sense that I kind of think I already knew it. There’s so much sloshing around in the chemical soup that is my brain that it’s hard to tell. But I knew I had to pick the word because its definition contained the words “drunken” and “orgy.” Now personally, I drink the way God intended: alone. But from a writing perspective, you can’t go wrong with those two words.

Boring Besides Bacchanal

This page contained a lot of words and phrases I knew: backbencher and backward, for example. But it also contained way too many bacci- words. These all have to do with berries. Are you a plant that yields berries? Then you are bacciferous! Are you shaped like a berry? Then you are bacciform! Do you feed on berries? Then you are baccivorous. (If you feed on picnic baskets, you are yogivorous, but that will have to wait for a later day.)

There was one really cool word: babbitt. That’s “a complacent person who conforms unthinkingly to middle-class standards.” Although I didn’t know the word, I was pretty sure that it was a reference to the Sinclair Lewis novel, Babbitt. So there’s that.

But I chose sex and drugs over literature: baccanal.

We have landed on page 18 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition. It was a difficult page, because it contained only one non-jargon word I didn’t know. But it is a good one: autonym.

The reason page 18 was so bad was that it was not a full page. This is because it was the last page in the A section. And it makes me wonder. Am I really going to continue to do this for well over a year longer. The last page of Z is 410. So I’m looking at about 13 months. The very idea of it frightens me.

Doing these Odd Words posts is hard. It isn’t that the work itself is hard, though. I liken it to imaginary numbers in math. When I first learned of imaginary numbers, I disliked them. And all through my studies, I was filled with dread whenever I had to deal with them. They were never a problem. But they felt like they were a problem. These posts are like that. I think it’s just knowing I have to deal with upside down e characters and umlauts and various other things that just aren’t on my keyboard.

But enough of my whining.

Finding My Autonym

One of my great failings as a human being is being overly honest. For many things I have written in the past, I should have used a pseudonym. But I didn’t because of my open nature and my extreme naivete when it comes to the way people react to things outside their comfort zone. On the plus side, I don’t have to worry about people discovering my autonym. Not that I don’t play around with my first name because, let’s face it, most people are far too self-involved to spend more than a couple of seconds researching me. (And they are right to be so disinterested!)

But I do think this is an excellent word: autonym.