re words.
Loan If you use loan as a verb in anything other than ultra-informal speech, you’re marking yourself as ignorant or careless. As of 2004, the verb to lend never comes off as fussy or pretentious, merely as correct.
Feckless A totally great adjective. One reason that slippage in the meaning of effete is OK is that we can use feckless to express what effete used to mean. Feckless primarily means deficient in efficacy, i.e., lacking vigor or determination, feeble; but it can also mean careless, profligate, irresponsible. It appears most often now in connection with wastoid youths, bloated bureaucracies — anyone who’s culpable for his own haplessness. The great thing about using feckless is that it lets you be extremely dismissive and mean without sounding mean; you just sound witty and classy. The word’s also fun to read because of the soft-e assonance and the k sound — the triply assonant noun form is even more fun.
All of Other than as an ironic idiom for “no more than” (e.g., “Sex with Edgar lasted all of a minute”), does all of have any legit uses? The answer is both complicated and personally humbling. An irksome habit of many student writers is automatically to stick an of between the adjective all and any noun that follows—“All of the firemen slid down the pole,” “She sent cards to all of her friends”—and I have spent a decade telling undergrads to abjure this habit, for two reasons. The first is that an excess of of’s is one of the surest signs of flabby or maladroit writing, and the second is that the usage is often wrong. I have promulgated the following rule: Except for the ironic-idiom case, the only time it’s correct to use all of is when the adj. phrase is followed by a pronoun—“All of them got cards”; “I wanted Edgar to have all of me”—unless, however, the relevant pronoun is possessive, in which case you must again omit the of, as in “All my friends despise Edgar.” Only a few weeks ago did I learn (from a bright student who got annoyed enough at my hectoring to start poring over usage guides in the hopes of finding something I’d been wrong about that she could raise her hand at just the right moment in class and embarrass me with [which she did, and I was, and deserved it — there’s nothing more ridiculous than a pedant who’s wrong]), however, that there’s actually one more complication to the first part of the rule. With all plus a noun, it turns out that the medial of is required if that noun is possessive, as in “All of Edgar’s problems stem from his childhood,” “All of Dave’s bombast came back to haunt him that day.” I doubt I will ever forget this.
Bland Here’s an adj. that the dictionaries are behind on. Bland was originally used of people to mean “suave, smooth, unperturbed, soothingly pleasing” (cf. blandish, blandishment), and of things to mean “soft, mild, pleasantly soothing, etc.” Only incidentally did it mean “dull, insipid, flavorless.” As of 2004, though, bland nearly always has a pejorative tinge. Outside of one special semi-medical idiom (“The ulcerous CEO was placed on a bland diet”), bland now tends to imply that whatever’s described was trying to be more interesting, piquant, stirring, forceful, magnetic, or engaging than it actually ended up being.
Noma This medical noun signifies an especially icky ulcerous infection of the mouth or genitals. Because the condition most commonly strikes children living in abject poverty/squalor, it’s a bit like scrofula. And just as the adj. scrofulous has gradually extended its sense to mean “corrupt, degenerate, gnarly,” so nomal seems ripe for similar extension; it could serve as a slightly obscure or erudite synonym for “scrofulous, repulsive, pathetically gross, grossly pathetic”… you get the idea.
Hairy There are maybe more descriptors for various kinds of hair and hairiness than any other word-set in English, and some of them are extremely strange and fun. The more pedestrian terms like shaggy, unshorn, bushy, coiffed, and so on we’ll figure you already know. The adj. barbigerous is an extremely uptown synonym for bearded. Cirrose and cirrous, from the Latin cirrus meaning “curl” or “fringe” (as in cirrus clouds), can both be used to refer to somebody’s curly or tufty or wispy/feathery hair — Nicolas Cage’s hair in Adaptation is cirrose. Crinite means “hairy or possessed of a hair-like appendage,” though it’s mainly a botanical term and would be a bit eccentric applied to a person. Crinose, though, is a people-adj. that means “having a lot of hair,” especially in the sense of one’s hair being really long. The related noun crinosity is antiquated but not obsolete and can be used to refer to somebody’s hair in an amusingly donnish way, as in Madonna’s normally platinum crinosity is now a maternal brown. Glabrous, which is the loveliest of all hair-related adjectives, means having no hair (on a given part) at all. Please note that glabrous means more baby’s-bottom-hairless than bald or shaved, though if you wanted to describe a bald person in an ironically fancy way you could talk about his glabrous dome or something. Hirsute is probably the most familiar upmarket synonym for hairy, totally at home in any kind of formal writing. Like that of many hair-related adjectives, hirsute’s original use was in botany (where it means “covered with coarse or bristly hairs”), but in regular usage its definition is much more general. Not so with the noun hirsutism, though, which is still semi-medical and means having a truly pathological amount of hair and/or hair that’s unusually or unevenly distributed — the point is that the noun’s not really a synonym for hairiness. Hispid means “covered with stiff or rough little hairs” and could apply to a military pate or unshaved jaw. Hispidulous is mainly just a puffed-up form of hispid and should be avoided. Lanate and lanated mean “having or being composed of woolly hairs.” A prettier and slightly more familiar way to describe woolly hair is with the adjective flocculent. (There’s also floccose, but this is used mainly of odd little hairy fruits like kiwi and quince.) Then there are the pil-based words, all derived from the Latin pilus (=hair). Pilose, another fairly common adj., means “covered with fine soft hair.” Deceptively similar-looking is pilous, which is a more hardcore-science adj. that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “characterized by or abounding in hair, hairy,” citing as an example the following (unexplained, thus kind of troubling) sentence: It is covered with a rough pilous epidermis. Pilous’s own similarity to pileous is not deceptive, since the latter, a medical adjective, means “consisting of or pertaining to hair”; e.g., certain hair-intensive cancerous growths are classified as pileous tumors. On the other hand, pileous tumors are sometimes also called piliferous tumors, wherein the latter adj. means “having or producing hair” (in botany, piliferous means “tipped with a hair,” as in certain weird leaves). There’s also piligerous, which means “covered or clothed in hair” and is used primarily of animals, and piliated, which comes from the plural of pilus and is used to describe certain kinds of hairy or fringe-intensive bacteria. Last but not least is the noun pilimiction, which names a hopefully very rare medical disorder “in which piliform or hair-like bodies are passed in the urine.” Outside of maybe describing some kind of terribly excruciated facial expression as pilimictive, however, it’s hard to imagine a mainstream use for pilimiction. (One pil-word N.B.: It so happens that the adjective pubescent literally means “covered with soft downy hairs,” so technically it qualifies as a synonym for pilose; but as of 2004 almost no reader will take pubescent this way, so I’d stick with pilose.) Tomentose means “covered with dense little matted hairs”—baby chimps, hobbits’ feet, and Robin Williams are all tomentose. Ulotrichous, which is properly classed with lannate and flocculent, is an old and extremely fancy term for “crisply woolly hair.” Be advised that it is also, if not exactly a racist adj., certainly a racial one — A. C. Haddon’s Races of Man, from the early 1900s, famously classified races according to three basic hair types: leiotrichous (straight), cymotrichous (wavy), and ulotrichous.