I’m taking a creativity workshop class, which had me read part of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. If you haven’t already heard of it, read Wikipedia’s entry on Flow for a summary — or, better yet, watch Csikszentmihalyi himself discuss “flow” in this TED Talks video.

The state of “flow” basically occurs when you’re completely focused on a task. It’s often called “being in the zone” — you know, like when you look up and suddenly 5 hours have passed. One of the characteristics of this state is that the activity is autotelic; you’re running just for the sake of running, or painting for the sake of painting. If you’re doing it for fame or fortune, it isn’t autotelic.

Autotelic comes from the Greek roots auto-, “self”, and -telic, having an “end” or “goal”. Combine the two and you get a self-goal — a goal within itself.

What are your favorite autotelic activities?

The Encyclopedia Britannica has an interesting bit of history about the dog days:

“The name originated with the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians; they believed that Sirius, the dog star, which rises simultaneously with the Sun during this time of the year, added its heat to the Sun’s and thereby caused the hot weather. Their belief that dogs were subject to spells of madness at this time also may have contributed to the name.”

Here in Los Angeles, the dog days came a little later this year. It’s been hot lately! Anyone else suffering from spells of madness? I know I am.

Bonus word: the adjective canicular means “relating to the dog days” or the Dog Star, since the Latin name for the star comes from canis, the Latin word for “dog”.

This word comes from the Old English word fæge, “doomed to die”. As a very old word preserved through Scottish, it’s no surprise that it sometimes comes up in fantasy-themed literature and video games. In fact, I came across this word precisely because of the game Dwarf Fortress!

Photo by polandeze

Some examples found on Google News include “America’s abstruse tax code”, “abstruse terms and conditions”, and “abstruse mathematics”. The abstruse sign pictured on the left is another prime example of something that’s hard to understand.

Interestingly, abstruse and extrude both share a Latin root: trudere, which means “to thrust” or “to push”. So abstruse literally means “to thrust away”, while extrude means “to thrust out”. The word extrude matches its literal Latin meaning perfectly, but abstruse doesn’t. How does “thrust away” mean “hard to understand”? Well, it turns out that abstruse has a second, obsolete meaning: “hidden”. I imagine an old book pushed under the bed, hidden from sight.

As a term used in mathematical notation, it refers to “a horizontal line placed above multiple quantities to indicate that they form a unit” (Wolfram MathWorld).

And in the world of Star Trek, the vinculum is a processing device in the core of Borg vessels that connects the minds of all the drones (Memory Beta Star Trek Wiki). Brainwashed drones all working in unison? Yup, vinculum is a perfect name for a device that creates a bond like that.

It comes straight from the Latin word contiguus, a combination of com-, “together”, and tangere, “to touch”.

I like this word because of the overarching, fundamental concept it represents. Just take a look at Wikipedia’s page on Contiguity to see its specific meanings in different areas of study. It shows up in everything from physics to psychology!

But contiguous shows up most often in the phrase “the contiguous United States”, which refers to the 48 states “on the North American continent south of the border with Canada, plus the District of Columbia” (Wikipedia).

Its origin is listed as unknown on every etymology site I could find. All anyone seems to know is that it’s an Americanism from around the year 1900. Do people still use this term? Or did I just spend so much time playing The Sims that I didn’t get out of the house enough to hear the word simoleon in real life?

This word comes straight from the Latin word corvus, meaning “raven”. Merriam-Webster shares an interesting bit of etymology:

Another word from “corvus” is “cormorant,” which refers to a dark-colored seabird and comes from Old French words meaning “raven” and “of the sea.”

Bonus trivia: Cormorants are known for their voracious appetites, so the word cormorant also means “a greedy person” or “glutton”.

This word is usually used to describe plants, but I think it’s a shame that it rarely shows up in any other context. There are plenty of glabrous globs of goop that need to be described as such!

At least I found one example sentence that uses glabrous creatively: “Colleen had her favorite hat on, and I decided to drive glabrous and unadorned; the sun felt wonderful and there would be plenty of time for hats later on” (Bob Ecker). I thought that was a humorous way to describe a bald guy driving a convertible.

Even though many people seem to like this word, it actually doesn’t show up that often (except when referring to the 1987 film starring Cher and Nicolas Cage). Maybe the word’s strong association with the film is precisely why writers don’t use it much anymore. Did Hollywood ruin this word forever? Will people always think of Cher when they see the word moonstruck?