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A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...
List of commonly misused English words. This is a list of English words that are thought to be commonly misused. It is meant to include only words whose misuse is deprecated by most usage writers, editors, and professional grammarians defining the norms of Standard English. It is possible that some of the meanings marked non-standard may pass ...
Archaic words and phrases. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Archaic words and phrases. Wiktionary has a category on Archaic terms by language.
Archaism. In language, an archaism is a word, a sense of a word, or a style of speech or writing that belongs to a historical epoch beyond living memory, but that has survived in a few practical settings or affairs. Lexical archaisms are single archaic words or expressions used regularly in an affair (e.g. religion or law) or freely; literary ...
ἀπὸ μηχανῆς Θεός. apò mēkhanês Theós. Deus ex machina. "God from the machine". The phrase originates from the way deity figures appeared in ancient Greek theaters, held high up by a machine, to solve a problem in the plot. "Ἀπὸ τοῦ ἡλίου μετάστηθι" — Diogenes the Cynic — in a 1763 painting by ...
Diction (Latin: dictionem (nom. dictio), "a saying, expression, word"), [1] in its original meaning, is a writer's or speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a piece of writing such as a poem or story. [2][3] In its common meaning, it is the distinctiveness of speech: [3][4][5] the art of speaking so that each word ...
Gibberish. Gibberish, also known as jibber-jabber or gobbledygook, is a speech or a text that is (or appears to be) nonsense: ranging across speech sounds that are not actual words, [1] pseudowords, language games and specialized jargon that seems nonsensical to outsiders. [2]
Archaic technological nomenclature are forms of speech and writing which, while once commonly used to describe a particular process, method, device, or phenomenon, have fallen into disuse due to the advance of science and technology. Such archaism is inevitable where continual re-invention and discovery makes technical concepts, names and ...