A Working Glossary of Private Definitions

personal vocab list I glance over (& steal from) before writing anything

Here you will find a list of words + definitions I invented to make them stick. Many of the words you will recognize, but most might be fuzzy (they were for me). They are the Tip of the Tongue words. You’ve read these, you have a vague sense of their shape, but if someone asked you to define them you might blank. Running the word down is its own pleasure. Getting creative with the definition is the larger one, a

nd I think it’s the invented definition sitting beside the real one that keeps the word from leaving my brain as soon as I’ve remembered it exists.

On this list: It was mostly made in my periphery. It’s underlined words I found in novels or something someone said in passing. It’s words that don’t get enough attention but I feel like they should. (I don’t collect the genuinely obscure here.) I add words and hyperlink to relevant essays so it is frequently edited.

Labyrinthine (adj.) — complexity by accretion, never by design, containing a center and the suspicion that no one planned it.

Wunderkammer (n.) — Literally "wonder-room." The Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, where a collector's shells and fossils and instruments revealed less about the objects than about the mind that gathered them. The original premise that what you choose to keep is a self-portrait. Unlike a museum, it had no taxonomy imposed from outside. the only organizing logic was the collector's own astonishment.

Wunderkind (n.) — German for "wonder child," the creature Forbes venerates. Defined entirely by age, a status with an expiration date built in.

Fallow (adj.) — Farmland deliberately left unplanted so it can recover what constant yield strips out. A fallow field is doing the most important work, it is replenishing. My river-bathing and laundromat-dozing years were the fallow season that made this later yield possible.

Crone (n.) — From carogne by way of insult, a word men made to discard old women. Now reclaimed, it means a woman who has aged out of the obligation to please. Concentrated by time, an alchemical distilling. The crone is what the wunderkind becomes if she's lucky enough to stop being watched.

Peripatetic (adj.) — From Aristotle's habit of teaching while walking the colonnades. thought that only moves when the body does. It names the suspicion that the good sentence arrives in the gap between the park bench and the café, never at the desk. The mind is peripatetic or it's asleep. Can be a noun when referencing someone who wanders or moves around habitually; an itinerant.

Daydream (vrb.) — The mind's refusal to stay where the body left it. Not sleep's involuntary theater but a chosen elsewhere, a low-stakes rehearsal of a life running parallel to this one.