Word of the Day!

zen·tan·gle [ˈzenˈtaŋ-gəl]:
origin: (2003) Maria Thomas & Rick Roberts: "Zen" + "Tangle"

noun
A form of art developed & marketed by Rick Roberts & Maria Thomas, respectively a Zen monk and a calligrapher (the tangle). The coining of the word is said to come about from a day when Rick could not get Maria's attention as she was so absorbed in her work -- she wasn't ignoring him, but literally had not heard him -- astounded at a level of concentration that normally took ascetics decades of training to master, they began to work together to promote a relatively simple form of art that they hoped would bring inner peace to the masses.

With the catchphrase, "Anything is possible...one stroke at a time", they developed a flexible method of techniques to welcome all ages, races, and skill levels. Typically creating (though not exclusively) black & white images, sectioned by lines and filled with patterns; images within images; worlds within worlds. This differs from doodling, as it is a focused method of style versus a subconscious one and there is a consistency to the appearance despite the many possible variations. World-renowned Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, utilizes a similar technique in her surreal exhibitions.

One can easily access zentangle techniques through Youtube as well as Pinterest.

ni·hil·ar·ti·kel [naɪhɪlˈarˈtiːkəl]:
origin: nihil= nothing + artikel= article

noun
Much like "cromulent" and "embiggens", this is a word designed as a joke that never actually existed and now does (semi-)legitimately; a neologism, first appearing in the German version of wikipedia.

Rightly enough, nihilartikel has come to mean exactly what it started out as: A deliberately fictitious entry or article on a subject, designed more to be playful than to cause deliberate harm, entrapment, or to further willful ignorance. However, it also raises the more and more dominant questions about "information" in the modern era, of the CIA-like pressure now facing everyday citizens on a daily basis regarding what is real or reliable, along with the corruption of what passes for fact.


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zzxjoanw [ˈshȯ] or [ziks-jo'an]:
origin: supposedly New Zealand, Maori

noun
Here is a perfect example of a nihilartikel!

Like many things we may wish existed or should in theory, but we are eventually forced to accept do not, similarly author Rupert Hughes made everyone want to accept zzxjoanw as a Maori word that could mean drum; fife; or conclusion -- it was republished several times, over a span of 70 years, before our culture's ignorance of their language was exposed. For the word cannot exist, as the Maoris' alphabet only possesses fourteen letters: AEGHIKMNOPRTUW (none of which are Z, X, or J).

A ghost word.

mon·de·green [ˈmɒndɪˌɡriːn]:
origin: (1954) Lady Mondegreen by Sylvia Wright

noun
Here's the thing...I grew up listening to music before there was ever such a device as "The Internet". This being said, that means looking up the lyrics of songs, which you did not own, was not a straight forward process. In fact, sometimes even if you owned the material there may not be any lyrics anywhere on the case or liner notes.

And with that being said, I'd always been a smidgen puzzled by Mr. Mister's big hit "Kyrie", but I took the male in the story of the song to be quite taken with some beguiling woman named Kyrie; where she laid he must travel, and she seemed to conjure up the energy of "lasers".

No, she did not.

Because she did not exist, the man was never singing about any femme fatale. I was correct though, in understanding there was a strong and enchanting presence, but that was "Kyrie eleison" -- which is in fact a small prayer in the Greek language, never-the-less used within (Latin) Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Anglican church ceremonies. I know this now because I was recently inspired to look it up after getting a CD with mixed songs from the 1980's.

And that is exactly what a mondegreen is, accidentally misheard words or phrase, as a result of a homophone (similarly sounding words), that gives the original concept a new meaning; an aural malapropism.

Another example: In the book The Glass Menagerie, when Jim O’Connor nicknamed Laura Wingfield "Blue Roses", having misunderstood her childhood ailment of "pleurosis" -- the nickname becoming symbolism for a beautiful object, but one never naturally occurring, just like her favorite crystal animal; a fantasy.

That too is interesting because the origin of the word is also literary, from a story of the same name of Lady Mondegreen, within it quoting Scottish song lyrics: Ye highlands and ye lowlands / Oh where hae you been? / Thou hae slay the Earl of Murray / And Lady Mondegreen. As with Kyrie, there never was a Lady Mondegreen, for the author Sylvia Wright had misheard the words from The Bonny Earl of Murray, whose last line is actually, "slay the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green."

The mistake so famous that it grew a life of it's own! Mondegreen is a mondegreen.

Lo·tha·ri·o (ləʊˈθɑːrɪˌəʊ):
origin: a story-within-the-story of Don Quixote (1605)

noun
1. A man whose chief interest is seducing women.
2. A novel about the loveless existence of an aging man (in 1703 play, The Fair Penitent).

There are a lot of things in life that are easy to take for granted, or moments when someone discovers something that is so obvious you wonder why it wasn't focused on before, compounded perhaps with revelations that were always waiting to be appreciated in full -- this recent addition to the language may be just one of those epiphanies...

Bi·o·pho·ny (baɪˈɒfənɪ):
origin: coined by Dr. Bernie Krause, combining the words "biology" and "symphony"

noun
A word describing a niche of soundscape (an acoustic environment), specifically animals. It is one of three components including geophony (non-biological natural sound) and anthrophony (manmade noises) of "soundscape ecology".
➝ Dr. Krause uses it as a tool to judge the health & evolution of an environment by tracking more subtle nuances than can be seen.

( Dr. Krause explains on BBC [4:29] )

Tes·ser·act (ˈte-sə-ˌrakt):
origin: coined in A New Era of Thought (1888) by C.H. Hinton, from the Greek [τέσσερεις ακτίνες] "four rays"

noun
a.k.a. "hypercube", "tetracube", "polytope"; a hexahedron with six equal squares as faces (or a four-dimensional analog of the cube). In a real tesseract, which cannot exist in our three-dimensional space, each edge would be the same length.

➝ examples of:
➀ Variating in shape, a version of the cube is found in Salvador Dalí's Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1953).
➁ A wrinkling of time allowing two points to be connected through a 5th dimension thus permitting time travel, used in the science-fiction novel A Wrinkle in Time (1973).
➂ Ancient Asgardian artifact of unimaginable power kept in Odin's chamber, referred to as "The Cosmic Cube" and featured in Marvel Comic's latest series of films -- culminating in The Avengers (2012).

( 3D image - WARNING: mesmerizing )

*request: Could we clean out the misspelled tags, please? I volunteer, if needed.