Balderdash
Although it is unfortunately not widely used anymore, balderdash means "nonsense." In fact, because of the way it sounds (ball-der-dash), it suggests extreme and utter nonsense. It's rather much like the crude word that we use to designate waste matter from the male counterpart of a cow. This crude word, however, has become so commonplace that it has lost its clout. Instead, when somebody expresses a particularly stupid idea, we can say, "That's balderdash!" The person may never have heard the word before, but he or she will know what it means – and we'll have the satisfaction of being emphatic without being crude.
Paradox
A paradox is: (1) a seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true; (2) something that exhibits inexplicable or contradictory aspects; (3) an assertion that is esssentially self-contradictory but is based on a valid deduction from acceptable premises; (4) a statement that is contrary to received opinion. The word derives from paradoxos (para = beyond, doxa = opinion), "conflicting with expectation." The adjective form is paradoxical, and the adverb is paradoxically. (Paraphrased from The American Heritage Dictionary)
The essential quality of a paradox is that it seems contradictory (or it appears that it should be contradictory), but it is not. For instance, if we feel more rested after six hours of sleep than we do after eight hours, we might call that a paradox because it seems that we would be more rested after having more sleep. Suppose that, in a problem-solving situation, we give up control of the situation and it works itself out. We may find it paradoxical that we solved the problem by not trying to solve the problem. Recently, a friend recovering from heart surgery remarked that, paradoxically, he felt much better a few weeks after the surgery than he had in years – it was contrary to his expectations. Life is, indeed, full of paradoxes.
Serendipity
The word serendipity refers to: “1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident. 2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries. 3. An instance of making such a discovery” (American Heritage Dictionary). The adjective form is serendipitous.
For example, suppose that you have been looking for a recording of a particular song for years with no success. One day, when you are in a store looking for something else, you accidentally find such a recording misfiled with the records you are leafing through. Or, better yet, you get lost in a strange city, wander into a music store to get out of the rain, start flipping through the albums just to pass the time, and stumble upon the very recording you have been seeking. This would be a serendipitous experience.
The word has an interesting origin. The English author Horace Walpole coined it in one of the many letters that are the basis for his lterary reputation. In a letter of January 28, 1754, he says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Walpole formed the word from an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of “a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of. . . .” (Source: American Heritage Dictionary).
Specificity
The noun derived from the adjective specific, specificity refers to the presence of particulars or details. When we want to say that something is excessively general or lacking in detail, we can declare that it lacks specificity. Of course, a certain amount of spitting is involved in the enunciation of the word, but we're stuck with it because there is no such word as "specificness."
Ubiquitous
If something is "ubiquitous" it has the quality of being – or appearing to be – everywhere at the same time. It is omnipresent. In contemporary American society, cell phones and SUVs are ubiquitous. The noun form of the adjective ubiquitous is either ubiquity (a good Scrabble word if you happen to hold , a y, a q, and two u's) or ubiquitousness (try saying that five times). The rarely used adverb form is ubiquitously.
Oxymoron
An oxymoron is an expression that is, or seems to be, a self-contradiction. The classic example is jumbo shrimp, since we think of something that is "jumbo" as being very large and "shrimp" as symbolizing anything very small. Oxymorons are very often used for humor, especially for deprecating humor. When we say, for example, that honest politician or honest lawyer is an oxymoron, we are implying that no such thing as an honest politician or honest lawyer exists. Other examples are military intelligence, feminine logic, and rap music. To call these oxymorons is to imply, respectively, that nothing having to do with the military is intelligent, that women are never logical, and that rap is not music. I think that most of my students would say that easy grammar test is an oxymoron.
Palindrome
Any sentence, word, or series of numbers that reads the same way backwards and forwards is called a
palindrome. Some examples of one-word palindromes are: boob, civic, deed, deified, eye, ewe, kayak, kook, level, madam, noon, peep, racecar, radar, redivider, refer, repaper, rotator, rotor, sagas, sees, sexes, stats, tot, and wow.
Some links to Web pages devoted to palindromes:
http://www.palindromelist.com/
http://www.fun-with-words.com/palindromes.html
http://www.mockok.com/ (specializes in single-sentence palindromes)
http://members.aol.com/gulfhigh2/words5.html (specializes in one-word palindromes)
Tautology
With respect to language, a tautology is a kind of redundancy in which two terms or phrases repeat the same meaning. To refer to a "round circle," for instance, is a tautology because all circles are round. Or if we say that something is "square in shape" or "blue in color," we are being tautological, since a square is by definition a shape and blue is by definition a color. Tautologies are sneaky; we may indulge in them without thinking – or precisely because we are not thinking. For example, how many of us refer to something as being "large in size" when all we really need to say that it is large? Or, more commonly, how often do we refer to "my personal opinion" when something that is my opinion is almost certainly personal?
Verbiage and Verbosity
Some people mistakenly believe that verbiage refers merely to the use of words; in fact, its first meaning is "an excess of words" or the use of more words than are necessary to express the idea. It is therefore synonymous with verbosity or wordiness. Many students in freshman composition bombard their instructors with verbiage, especially when they have little to say but are trying to make their essays longer. Some indulge in a kind of verbiage that I have dubbed "verbal megalomania" – the use of big or pretentious words – sometimes with little real knowledge of what the words mean.
You probably know someone whose speech habitually contains verbiage, someone who is verbose – in short, a chatterbox. There are good words for that too: they are loquacious or garrulous (the noun forms are loquacity and garrulity or garrulousness). So the next time you are on the receiving end of a nonstop exercise in verbiage or verbosity, instead of telling the speaker to "shut up" or "stop running off at the mouth," ask him or her to please stop being so loquacious or garrulous.
