WD Editors

The Gilded Tongue: Overly Eloquent Words for Everyday Things
by Rod Evans, PhD
ISBN 1582973822
$16.99 velvet hardcover with gold foil stamp, 224 pages

Look Inside!

Click here to view the first spread in the book.

Join the Ranks of the Clerisy

For word lovers everywhere, The Gilded Tongue is a treasure trove of esoteric synonyms for everyday words. You’ll ascend to the uppermost ranks of literary intellgentsia once you aquire the grandiloquent terms in this lush volume. More than 500 entries will help you replace common, everyday language with meretricious words guaranteed to make an indelible impression on your friends, coworks, and family. Never settle for plain, simple expression again.

Sample Entries

• sialoquent: adj. from Greek sialon (saliva), and Latin loqui (to speak): spraying saliva while speaking.
• flebile: adj. from Lating flebilis (lamentable, wretched): teareful, doleful.
• quatopygia: n. from Latin quatio (to shake) and Greek pyge (buttocks): the shaking of the buttocks in walking, a word especially applied to an erotic feminine walk.

Introduction

We English-speakers are heirs to a rich treasure, a language that has so freely borrowed from other languages as to contain more than one million words. This dictionary contains two interesting subgroups of words: (i) esoteric (little-known) terms for which there are common single-word synonyms (such as “pugilist,” meaning “boxer”), and (ii) esoteric terms for which there are no single-word synonyms but rather synonymous phrases (such as “emacity,” meaning “an uncontrollable desire to buy things”). All entries, which appear in at least one unabridged dictionary, describe common phenomena using gilded, highfalutin’ language.

A Note About the Definitions
Sometimes the entries will contain more than one definition. More often, the entries will contain only one definition, either the most popular or the one that is most interesting, at least according to the author.

A Note About Parts of Speech
Note that most of the entries are nouns (indicated by n.) or adjectives (indicated by adj.), though some are verbs (indcated by v.). Most of the entries belong to only one part of speech, but some can function as nouns or verbs. Because many of the entries carry multiple meanings, it is possible that this dictionary contains the most popular meaning of a term when it occurs as a noun or a verb, but does not contain all the meanings of the term as it functions in all parts of speech. The sentence illustrating the meaning will use the word according to the part of speech ascribed to it in the dictionary.

A Note About Word Origins
This dictionary contains a brief explanation of the meanings and origins of the roots words, not a complete etymological analysis. When a word can be traced through several languages, often only the oldest source will be listed, especially when that source is Greek or Latin.

How to Use This Book
You can use this dictionary in two main ways. First, you can simply pick it up and begin reading anywhere. On any page you’ll find some fascinating words that you probably never knew existed. Second, you can find a word by looking at its definition in the reverse dictionary (reversicon) at the end of the book.

Using the Reversicon
Although dictionaries usually list the words to be defined in alphabetical order, a reverse dictionary or reversicon lists definitions or descriptions of concepts in alphabetical order and then provides words fitting those definitions. For example, suppose you want to find a word meaning “hatred of marriage,” you’ll find the appropriate word (”misogamy”) in the reverse dictionary of this book under “marriag, hatred of.”

Reverse dictionaries are particularly useful when dealing with unusual words for common phenomena, such as “misogamy.” Consider another example. Although we are all quite familiar with the metal or plastic tube fixed around each end of a shoelace, we may not know the word “aglet,” which describes that item.

This reverse dictionary sometimes contains a few definitions for one term. Accordingly, be the definitions “purgative” and “laxative,” you’ll see the word “lapactic” because its definition include ideas associated with both. Once you look up “lapactic” in the main part of the book, you’ll get a clearer sense of its meaning, especially after you see the word used in a sentence.