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One day last month I posted a very obscure word on my web page:
the worthless word for the day is: noctuolent
[fr. L. noctu, by night + olent, redolent of] obs. rare of a flowering plant: more strongly scented at night than during the day
"Dog-rose, The noctuolent plants, of which there are several kinds, as some of the geraniums, and of the jasmines, etc." - Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopędia (Suppl. 1753)
"noctuolent (NOK-too-o-lent) smelling strongest at night - the noctuolent bog on the property" - David Grambs, The Endangered English Dictionary
not to be confused with noctilucent (luminescent at night or in the dark, also rare in this sense)
How obscure is this? 11 ghits, 5 of which are attributable to me, and only one of which has any cachet (the Chambers ref.); one(1) hit at Google Books, from the Grambs word book.
Now comes the fun part. The index of the Grambs book has this: "night, smelling strongest at: NOCTUOLUCENT"
googling, noctuolucent gets 73(!) ghits, amongst which the most damaging is, of course, from the same index, at an amazon.com review: So if you are looking for a compact way to describe something--a flower, say--that smells strongest at night, try "noctuolucent."
It's a lot easier to foist a non-word on the unsuspecting masses these days.
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Promotion of illiteracy abounds, accelerated by technology. The fallacy should be fairly obvious in '-lucent', as in 'translucent'. Put a gripe in an Amazon review of the book?
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Quote:
Holy conflation, tsuwm!
exactamundo!! the Grambs book has: noctilucous.. notivagant.. noctuolent; and in the index has: night, shining at: NOCTILUCOUS night, smelling strongest at: NOCTUOLUCENT
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