1. alow: below
Jay went alow to see if he could find more drinks for the hard-working crew.
A nautical term, "alow" means "in or to a lower part of the vessel", indicating the deck or the area of the rigging closest to the deck. The opposite of "alow" is the more frequently used word, "aloft", used to refer to a higher part of the ship.
"Someone's turned the chest out alow and aloft."
~ Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The expression "alow and aloft" refers to the upper and lower parts of a ship, but can also be used in a more general sense to mean completely or thoroughly.
2. ekphrasis: a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art
The art history student was required to write an ekphrasis on Picasso's painting Guernica, which depicts the tragedies of war and the tremendous suffering it causes.
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| Guernica, courtesy of Wikipedia |
I encountered a variation of this word before, when I read and reviewed an arresting collection of flash fiction inspired by various works of art, We Bury the Landscape by Kristine Ong Muslim. I featured the word here in order to employ this term, and to make it more permanent in my memory.
3. WYSIWYG: a display generated by word-processing or desktop publishing software that exactly reflects the appearance of the printed document; acronym for "what you see is what you get"
We made the pamphlet using a simple WYSIWYG program.
Originally used by advertisers to indicate that a deal was honest and straightforward, today computer users use this term to describe software that accurately reflects the appearance of the finished product. This is obviously very helpful. Sometimes I wish previews of my blog posts were more identical to the actual posts, especially in regards to spacing issues.
Hosted by Kathy from BermudaOnion's Weblog, Wondrous Words Wednesday is one of my favorite memes. What new words have you discovered recently?
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