It's licit to say sipid

My good friend Steve -- marketing guru, outstanding guitarist, and champion backwards speaker -- gets a newsletter (I'll link to it when he tells me who sends it) that focuses on unusual words. The newsletter comes out weekly, and each week has a theme.

Last week, it was the positive versions of words whose negative versions are much more commonly used. For example: Did you know the following are all words?

Scrutable

Vincible

Evitable

Gainly

Couth

Licit

Sipid

Pervious

Gruntled

Requite

Trepid

Please remain gruntled, despite my sounding sipid as I indulge the evitable temptation to use these licit words. Be kind, as I am pervious to insult.

With requited love --

--T.A.

Comments

[nappy40]

I didn't know many of those were words. Excuse my ignorance; my trepid ways have rendered me lacking in couth.

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

Remind me not to play Scrabble with you.

[amba]

It's A Word A Day.

http://wordsmith.org/awad/gift.html

I get it too. The theme is weekly, but the newsletter is daily. You literally get a word a day, every day, with all sorts of intriguing info about it. This is done by a guy named Anu Garg, who's just published his second book.

In the early days in NY when we roomed together, Sara and I had a list posted of what we called "obsolete positives." In addition to the above (which I still don't quite believe are licit words -- we didn't care if ours were, and in fact thought it was funnier if they weren't), we had ept and ert and chalant and nocuous. We had quite a list.

I posted about it, way ahead of Anu Garg:

http://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2005/02/obs_pos_a_word_.html

And then there's this:

http://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2005/02/more_wordplay.html

(Wish you'd enable HTML in your comments.)

[Tamar]

Purrfect for Scrabble. I'll let my nephew know. Hurrah!

[Danny]

Love it! My sister and I still frequently use the word "nile" to describe someone who is not "senile."