The Lexicon Obscura

A lover of sunsets — someone for whom the daily descent of the sun is not background scenery but an event worth stopping for. Not to be confused with the person who photographs sunsets for social media; the opacarophile is characterized by the watching rather than the documenting. The quality of attention they bring to the sky at day’s end is the thing. Every evening offers one. Most evenings, most people miss it.

Example

“She was a committed opacarophile — whatever the day had been, she made a point of finding a window for the last ten minutes of it, watching the sky do what it does every evening and somehow never quite the same way twice.”

Origin

From the Latin opacus (shaded, dark) and the Greek philos (lover of). A relatively recent coinage, constructed on classical roots to fill a gap that classical languages somehow left open. The word for someone who loves sunrises is auroraphile. The Lexicon Obscura reserves the right to return to that one.

Rarity ●●●●●

The feeling is universal. The word is not. Until now.

To waste time while appearing to be occupied — the act of creating a convincing visual impression of working without the inconvenience of actually doing any. Distinct from mere laziness (which involves no performance) and from procrastination (which involves genuine internal conflict). Fudgeling is a craft: the papers moved with purpose, the keyboard used with apparent intent, the expression of mild concentration maintained throughout. An underappreciated skill, now formally named.

Example

“For the last forty minutes of the afternoon he had been fudgeling — rearranging windows on his screen, annotating a document he would not return to, and producing, in total, one paragraph of actual work.”

Origin

18th-century English, of uncertain origin. Documented in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796) — a remarkable volume that preserved a great number of words that polite society preferred not to know about. Grose’s dictionary deserves its own series.

Rarity ●●●●●

You have done this. Probably today. The word does not judge. It merely names.

The uniform dark grey perceived by the human visual field in the absence of all light. Total darkness is not black — it is eigengrau. The visual cortex, receiving no information from the outside world, generates its own baseline signal, which the brain interprets as a particular shade of dark grey. You are not seeing nothing; you are seeing eigengrau. A companion to phosphene from Vol. 10: together they describe the two ways your eyes produce light from within rather than receiving it from without.

Example

“He lay in the dark, watching the eigengrau — that particular shade of grey that isn’t quite nothing, the colour the brain defaults to when the world stops providing input.”

Origin

German: eigen (own, intrinsic) + grau (grey). Literally “intrinsic grey” — the grey that belongs to the visual system itself. A term from visual psychophysics that has crossed into general use and deserves to cross further.

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Darkness is not black. It never was. Now you have the word for what it actually is.

A neurological symptom characterized by an excessive and compulsive tendency to make puns, jokes, and witticisms — especially ones that the person making them finds considerably more amusing than their audience does. Associated with certain types of frontal lobe damage, though the milder, non-clinical version is extremely common and entirely familiar. The person at the meeting who cannot let a single opportunity for a pun pass. The one who is visibly delighted by their own jokes while the room remains politely unmoved. Witzelsucht. Now it has a name.

Example

“His witzelsucht was most pronounced in meetings — every agenda item a potential setup, every silence an opportunity, the puns arriving whether the room was ready or not.”

Origin

German: Witz (joke, wit) + Sucht (addiction, compulsion). Literally “joke addiction.” A clinical term from neuropsychology that has escaped into general use, where it applies to a far wider population than the medical literature intended.

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You know someone with this. You may be someone with this. The word is not an insult. It is a diagnosis.

The inherent, essential nature of something — the quality or qualities that make it what it is rather than anything else. In medieval scholastic philosophy, the quiddity of a thing was its “whatness”: the answer to the question “what is it?” at the deepest level. In less technical use, it refers to whatever constitutes the irreducible character of a person, a place, a work, or an idea — the thing that would remain if you stripped away everything accidental and kept only what is essential. Also: a trifling point, a quibble. The word has two meanings and both are excellent.

Example

“She had read everything he had written trying to find the quiddity of it — whatever quality was present in every piece, the thing that made it unmistakably his and nobody else’s.”

Origin

From the medieval Latin quidditas (whatness), from quid (what). A translation of the Aristotelian concept of to ti ên einai — “the what it was to be” a thing. Philosophy has rarely produced a more useful word, and has certainly produced less pleasant-sounding ones.

Rarity ●●●●●

The question this entire series is trying to answer: what is the quiddity of a word that nobody uses?