Hi all,

Clearly anybody who's reading a forum like this has a deep love for words, but I think that we bibliophiles run into a problem with our hobby: Language is a contract between a writer and the reader to agree on a meaning for a word, and we like rare words with obscure meanings. You'd be hard pressed to work "phlegmatic" into a conversation but there are some words like "surd" (an unvoiced sound in linguistics or an irrational number) that you probably can't even use in formal writing because it would send people grasping for the biggest dictionary they have.

I wrote an article on the subject for the magazine I edit, which you can read here. I hope you find it interesting (it's filled to the brim with strange words).

Visit Califerne Magazine at www.califerne.com.