While the English language is filled with thousands of descriptive words, I have found that in my writing, I am drawn to a few that really make me smile. Here are a few of my particular favs:
Boondoggle – noun – “work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value”; verb – “waste money or time on unnecessary or questionable projects.” In my worlds, this is the official name for every doomed committee, cursed initiative, and grand crusade that was never going to work but looked great on parchment. It’s the perfect label for quests designed to chew up heroes, shadow programs that exist only to hide darker truths, and those sprawling bureaucratic schemes that exist so the powerful can pretend they are doing something while the real story festers underneath.
Cacophony – noun – “a harsh, discordant mixture of sounds.” The word is a racket all by itself, all hard consonants and clanging vowels. It’s perfect for describing riotous cities, chaotic battlefields, or a blast beat and screaming guitar solo colliding in a way that only a metalhead could possibly call beautiful.
Cattywampus – adjective – “not lined up or not arranged correctly, or diagonally.” It sounds like a cartoon cat fell down the stairs, and that’s meant as the highest compliment. It’s the perfect word for crooked picture frames, listing porches, and backroads that refuse to run straight, and it somehow still squeezes itself into country songs without breaking the rhythm.
Ephemera – noun – “things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time.” It’s a pretty word for the detritus of memory: ticket stubs, flyers, brittle letters, the paper ghosts of a life. Ephemera is where stories hide after everyone stops paying attention.
Flesh – noun – “the soft substance consisting of muscle and fat that is found between the skin and bones of an animal or a human.” It’s a deeply uncomfortable word that shows up everywhere from horror novels to butcher shops. The bonus British verb meaning “give a hound or hawk a piece of the flesh of game that has been killed in order to incite it” turns flesh into an ignition source, the thing you use to switch a predator on.
Gobbets – noun – “a piece or lump of flesh, food, or other matter.” It sounds almost innocent, like a children’s book character, right up until you hang it off a dinosaur’s teeth. The contrast between the cute, bouncy sound and the disgusting, dripping image is exactly why it works so well in horror, because it lulls you with its soft syllables before hitting you with the meat.
Grimoire – noun – “a book of magic spells and invocations.” It’s heavier than it looks, as if the pages themselves are burdened with every bargain ever made in its margins. Even the word feels like leather and dust and whispered Latin, exactly the kind of volume you shouldn’t open alone at night.
Hardscrabble – adjective – “involving hard work and struggle.” You can hear gravel in this one, feel the sting of busted knuckles and scraped knees on cobblestone. It’s a single word that conjures entire childhoods of doing without, of scraping and clawing for every inch, which makes it a fantastic street name and a terrible place to actually pay a mortgage on.
Miasma – noun – “an oppressive or unpleasant atmosphere that surrounds or emanates from something.” This is not just a smell, it’s a presence, a clinging, invisible fog that gets in your hair and behind your eyes. It’s equally at home describing cursed swamps, haunted basements, and the weaponized fragrance cloud of certain candle stores that shall remain nameless.
Prehensile – adjective – “capable of grasping or holding.” It’s usually reserved for tails, trunks, and strange, curling appendages that don’t quite know when to let go. It’s a word that feels like it’s reaching out even as you say it, perfect for jungles, alien biologies, and the quiet horror of something in the dark that can touch you before you ever see it.
Rotgut – noun or adjective – “poor-quality and potentially toxic alcoholic liquor.” It’s one of those words that does exactly what it says on the tin, and you can feel it burning a hole in your insides just hearing it. It’s so vivid that of course it ends up as the name of a video game and a punk band, because what else are you going to call something loud, rough, and bad for your health.
Scurrilous – adjective – “making or spreading scandalous claims about someone with the intention of damaging their reputation.” It feels slick and oily in the mouth, like the word is already up to no good while you’re saying it. This is gossip with teeth, the vocabulary of tavern whispers, tabloid headlines, and characters who weaponize rumor the way other people wield knives.
Sinew – noun – “a piece of tough fibrous tissue uniting muscle to bone or bone to bone; a tendon or ligament.” This is anatomical poetry, the word you use when you want the body to feel raw and real on the page. It pairs beautifully with things like gristle and tendon, all those chewy, resistant textures that make your prose feel like it has some muscle on it.
Thaumaturgical – adjective – “relating to the working of miracles or magic.” It sounds clinical, almost bureaucratic, like someone tried to file sorcery under a manageable heading. It’s what you call it when the ritual works, the machine awakens, and reality politely steps aside to let something else through.
How about you? What are your favorite go-to words in conversation or print?