Your novel A Questionable Shape uses quite a few unusual words, including addorsed, apostil, claustral, colligates, lazzarettos, roscid, taphephobia … were there any unusual words you wanted to use but couldn’t fit into the narrative?

I remember drafting a long digressive description that was mostly an occasion to use the surgical term anastomose in a fun and figurative way. Okay, I just looked up the passage: the narrator is playing chess and describing how pawns move across the board: ‘even though they advance in just a single forward direction, they still attack diagonally, such that their strike zones can form momentary anastomoses between both axes.’ Reading the line now, over a decade later, I still relish the word ‘anastomoses’ here: the music it makes with ‘strike,’ ‘zone,’ ‘momentary,’ ‘both,’ and ‘axes’; the way that it connects two disparate discourses, building a conceptual bridge—an anastomosis if you like—between medicine and chess. In the end I decided to cut the digression (I no longer remember why) and felt the loss of the word keenly. I had it in mind to use it in some other work of fiction in the future, but I haven’t gotten around to rehoming it yet.

How do you add to your word-hoard? Do you keep lists of words you’d like to use?

I do keep a running word-hoard, both analogue (in a blue spiral-bound notebook) and digital (in my Notes app). Usually I just come across good words in the wild, while reading. But sometimes I go hunting for a specific word that I know must exist. An example I often give of this is ecdysis, the technical term for spider molting, when it sheds one exoskeleton to grow a new one. In my collection White Dialogues, there’s a story called ‘House-sitting’ about a character slowly going mad in a cabin in the woods. They become obsessed with spiders, incubi, and some black silhouettes that they find spray-painted in the grass out back. At one point, they come to regard the silhouettes as incubi themselves, nightmares that have been shed the way that a spider sheds its shell: ‘Moltings of madness,’ they think. ‘Part exorcism and part ecdysis.’ Originally, this thought ended at ‘Moltings of madness.’ But I can remember getting stuck on the description and thinking, ‘There must be a specific term for spider moltings,’ so I just googled it. Once I’ve found the word I want, the next step is to make it feel natural within the sentence: to make the sentence want it, in a sense. With ecdysis, I was grateful for the sound of it, since it already slant-rhymed with madness. I added exorcism as a way of further summoning the sound of ecdysis into the sentence (the technical term for summoning a spirit—rather than expelling one—is adorcism, I learned recently. Here, exorcism was my adorcism for ecdysis). In general, I do try to use sound to prepare the reader for the arrival of recherché words. Once you’ve read exorcism, your ear is prepared to hear eh- and -is sounds, so an unfamiliar term like ecdysis—which might otherwise feel jarring—feels musical instead, and inevitable. I think of this as a kind of assonantal padding in the prose, a sonic pocket or slot that the word can fit into. If everything works right, it seems to just slide into place as if it had always belonged there.

Are you a word-coiner? The unusual word mnemocartography appears as a coinage in your book (I could only find one other example of the word elsewhere). Do you have any other coinages you’d like to share?

I did resort to making up mnemocartography. But even at the time I wondered whether it was a ‘real’ word. I’m excited to hear you found another usage of it! Where at? [Editor’s note: it’s also used in a scholarly paper about cartography and the Holocaust.] As for the coinage: A Questionable Shape is a zombie novel, in which the undead return to nostalgically charged sites from their mortal lives, wandering through old neighborhoods and navigating by memory maps. I wanted a single word that conveyed that sense of ‘memory mapping,’ and I wanted it to sound quasi-official or philosophical, so I just jammed two Latinisms together (on the model of mnemotechnics, a word that I had come across in Jalal Toufic’s writings on Nietzsche, though I can’t remember—ironically—whether Nietzsche coined it or Toufic did).

I’m sure I’ve made up other words too, but only one is coming to me. It’s from my last book, Other Minds and Other Stories, in the story ‘Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.’ The protagonist is a graduate student who is haunted by self-hatred, and at one point he thinks of it as hauntred (on the model of hauntology, a coinage that I came across in Derrida).

What’s your favorite reference book? How do you use it?

When I got my first real job, the first real gift I bought myself was the full twenty-volume edition of the OED. I’d been using the two-volume shorter OED before that. The complete edition is easily my favorite and most frequently consulted reference resource. If I come across an unfamiliar word while reading, I’ll look it up in the OED rather than googling the definition, because I’m sure to learn half a dozen other words as well. I tend to flip through the pages slowly as I approach the entry I’m looking for, letting my eye fall on random words along the way. I like the quotations, of course, and I like the long lists of rare or obsolete combining forms (e.g., the other day I was skimming through the variations on oneiro-, the prefix for dreams: my favorite was oneirodynia, ‘disturbed sleep’).

What’s a word (or words) you think more people should know and use? Are there any overused words you’d like to put into a time-out for a while?

Petrichor seems pretty well known, but people rarely actually use it in conversation, and sometimes I do meet people who have never heard it before. It’s the term for that summery fragrance of pavement after a rainstorm (petro-, relating to rocks, + -ichor, blood of the gods). It’s faux-mythic and fun to say—it sounds like the name of a metal band—so I’d be happy if people used it more.

As for words to retire: I’ve noticed that more and more people are using reticent (silent, taciturn, reluctant to speak) to mean reluctant. Whenever I hear someone say something like ‘I’m reticent to eat another hot dog’ or ‘I’m reticent to go skinny-dipping,’ it grates on me, but as a reticent person myself, I’m reluctant to correct them. Maybe that’s why it bothers me: the original meaning is so useful and worth preserving for us introverts, yet it risks being cannibalized by this redundancy with reluctant. We already have reluctant. Just say reluctant!

What other authors’ word-use inspires you?

There are too many to list (Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, Carmen Machado, Cormac McCarthy, Norman Rush, Tony Tulathimutte, David Foster Wallace, et al.). But if I had to pick just one role model, it would doubtless be Nicholson Baker. I’ve tried to borrow the most from his style: his affectionate focus on the minute parts of things; his facility at mixing casual and technical registers; the playful way that he uses assonance to solder two terms together (e.g., in U and I, when he describes typing as ‘slapping esemplastically’ at the keyboard). I’ve also borrowed more words from him than from any other author, probably. Off the top of my head: effleurage, erumpent, florilegium, soffit. As Martin Amis put it in his profile of Baker, he is ‘the poet of all the things we call thingies and thingamajigs, all the things we don’t know the name for: nubs and tines, spigots and sprockets, roller-cookers and tone-arms and pull-tabs and slosh-caps.’

Speaking of florilegium, Baker is quite funny about his own neurotic, compulsive relationship to vocabulary. In his memoir U and I, he describes a moment when, rereading a sentence of his, he ‘looked askance at “florilegia” and “plenipotentiary”’:

I felt a needle jump in my déjà vu-meter that might indicate that I’d used them both before, and I didn’t like the idea of people (i.e., Updike) thinking, “Florilegia again? It wasn’t that great the first time! He’s pretending his vocabulary is a touch-me-anywhere-and-I’ll-secrete-a-mot-juste kind of thing, when it turns out to be this cribbed little circle of favored freaks that he uses over and over hoping nobody will notice!” So what I have to do now is to search the disks that hold my two novels for the words “florilegia” and “plenipotentiary…

I think of this passage all the time when revising my own work, conducting my own CTRL+F searches. James Wood has that great line about Melville—‘What writer does not dream of touching every word in the lexicon once?’—and what I love about this passage (and about Baker’s work in general) is the way that it comically exposes the underside of that dream: how, if you touch a word in the lexicon more than once, it risks transforming the dream into style’s nightmare. I will probably never use ecdysis again, for instance.

What question do you wish people would ask you about your book but you haven’t been asked yet?

No one has ever asked me why I like ‘big’ words in the first place: to justify my love for them, or to work out an aesthetics of sesquipedalianism. One reason I was grateful to do this interview is that it seemed like an opportunity to actually think this question through. So. Why is it that I’m attracted to odd or exotic vocabulary as a component of style? When I come across an unfamiliar word while reading and take pleasure in it, what does that pleasure consist in?

Whenever I pose this question to myself, there are three passages that I find myself returning to. The first is that iconic dialogue from Don DeLillo’s Underworld, when the narrator is being quizzed on cobbler terminology and exhorted to ‘name the parts’ of his shoe: sole, heel, tongue, cuff, counter, quarter, welt, vamp, lace, eyelet, aglet, grommet. At one point the narrator says, ‘I knew the name. I just didn’t see the thing,’ and he’s reprimanded: ‘You didn’t see the thing because you don’t know how to look. And you don’t know how to look because you don’t know the names…How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don’t know what they’re called.’ So that’s a part of the pleasure: vocabulary as vision, precision as an organ of perception. This is likely what Amis had in mind when he called Baker the poet of things we don’t have names for.

The second passage is from Bakhtin’s essay ‘Discourse in the Novel.’ Bakhtin is thinking, in part, about how a writer individuates their voice, giving a word ‘stylistic shape’ against the background of its discourses, and describing an object uniquely against the backdrop of all previously existing descriptions. Every object, Bakhtin suggests, comes ‘enveloped in an obscuring mist’ of all the ‘alien words that have already been spoken about it.’ The difficulty of style is finding a word that can penetrate that fog like a ‘ray of light.’ I always picture Bakhtin’s mist as those metadata word clouds, where the most frequently used terms are floating up front in large font. An object like a shoe is going to be concealed behind tip-of-the-tongue terms like tongue and lace. To refresh our perception of the shoe, a writer might need to find the tiniest, rarest word in the cloud (vamp, grommet), or even introduce a brand-new one (Baker is probably the only writer to have injected esemplastic into the keyboard cloud). The interplay between the word cloud and the writer’s word—the delta between the word the reader is expecting and the surprising word that the writer alights on—is style. We feel the aliveness of the writer’s mind inside that decision, and we can now see the object in a new light, the writer’s light. As Bakhtin puts it, once the writer’s word enters that ‘agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words,’ it ‘may leave a trace in all its semantic layers…and influence its entire stylistic profile.’ So that’s part of the pleasure, too: individualized vocabulary makes novel contributions to an object’s descriptive mist, helps saturate the word cloud with hapaxes.

And finally, there’s a lovely passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, when Barthes compares his own heteroglossic style to the playground game of ‘prisoner’s base.’ ‘What I liked best,’ he recalls, ‘was to free the prisoners—the effect of which was to put both teams back into circulation. In the great game of the powers of speech, we also play prisoner’s base: one language has temporary rights over another; all it takes is for a third language to appear…The task of language is to release the prisoners: to scatter the signifieds, the catechisms.’ I’m reminded of this passage whenever I encounter unusual juxtapositions, which combine terms from far-flung fields of reference. There’s a sense, for instance, in which Baker has freed esemplastic from the prisoner base of Coleridge criticism (or wherever he encountered it), putting it back into circulation for quotidian description. That’s a last part of the pleasure as well, for me: vocabulary as a jailbreaking of jargon, or (to depart from Barthes’s metaphor) a way of cross-pollinating argots.

Whether my own use of vocabulary affords any of these pleasures—or lives up to these ideals—is, of course, for the reader to decide. But that is usually what I’m thinking about when I’m thinking about ecdysis.

abacost

“Mobutu also banned European attire, imposing a sort of national uniform, a Mao-style tunic called an abacost—short for a bas le costume, or “down with the suit”—inspired by a visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1973.”

Although the abacost is intended to be worn without a tie, it can be worn with a cravat.

bifurcation

“Indeed, the taboo against clothing that revealed or even suggested a woman’s legs was so complete that women wearing loose-fitting trousers became a popular sexual fetish, known in the trade as “bifurcation.””

The word ‘bifurcation’ comes from Latin roots meaning ‘two’ and ‘forked’.

cornette

“For instance, the iconic habit of the Sisters of Charity was distinguished by a wimple or cornette—a large starched headdress, with upturned corners.”

In the U.S., the Daughters of Charity wore the cornette until after the Second Vatican Council in 1964. (The most famous representation of the cornette is popular culture is probably the 1960s TV show The Flying Nun.)

pachuca

“It was also a sisterhood: young women who wore a feminine zoot suit ensemble were labeled pachucas, “Zoot suit gangsterettes,” and “zooterinas.””

The origin of the word pachuca (feminine of pachuco) is unclear. It may come from the name of Pachuca, a city in Mexico, or from a Spanish word meaning ‘yokel’.

sprezzatura

“Sprezzatura—the ancient art of seemingly effortless style—is both a status symbol and a way of turning a uniform into a mode of personal expression.”

The word ‘sprezzatura’ was coined in 1528 by Baldassare Castiglione, author of the influential The Book of the Courtier, which addresses the question of what constitutes the courtier, or “ideal gentleman”.

affordance

“Conventional models of perceptual psychology didn’t accurately account for what he saw, so once peace had returned Gibson set to work on a new theory of perception, which included the concept of affordance: that aspect of an object which makes the object useful to a human interacting with it.”

Affordances depend not just on the qualities of the object, but the abilities of the human interacting with it.

egodocument

“‘Egodocument’, a neologism first coined by the historian Jacques Presser in the 1950s, is now a widely used umbrella term for diaries and journals, and the first academic journal devoted to ‘life writing’ appeared in 2012.”

Egodocuments include diaries, journals, travelogues, correspondence, memoirs, and wills.

polyptych

“Operating on the same principle as a wipe-clean table-book or wax tablet, the polyptych consisted of twelve fine ivory sheets, pinned together at one end so that they could fan open for temporary note-taking.”

The word polyptych comes from a Greek word meaning ‘having many folds’. The polyptych described here is Thomas Jefferson’s.

schifanoia

“The only surviving draft was dedicated, as a schifanoia or ‘boredom buster’, to Isabella d’Este, Countess of Mantua and one of the Renaissance’s most important patrons.”

The word schifanoia comes from an Italian phrase meaning “to escape from boredom”. The Este family also had a palazzo, the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, now a museum.

woodfree

“Confusingly, ‘woodfree’ paper is made of wood: the term refers to the pulp having been bleached to remove the tint of wood sap.”

Woodfree paper is also called ‘tree-free’ or ‘fine’ paper. The chemical process used to create it removes lignin, which is the source of paper yellowing.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five Words From …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist explains Spotify’s influence on the modern music business, and how it’s reshaped the experience of both listening to and creating music.

datafication

“The writer Rob Horning once argued in his newsletter that datafication, or the process of rendering our lives as data, is ‘first and foremost a kind of surveillance designed to impose classification and norms on the surveilled while devaluing whatever ways they understand themselves.’”

Places such as the Data Justice Lab investigate the social justice implications of how personal data is used by corporations for profit.

enshittification

“In the hands of major labels and streambait consultants, AI was looking likely to become just another tool of what Cory Doctorow called platform decay, or “enshittification,” and it was all going to be monetized by streaming.”

Doctorow explains enshittification as “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

freemium

“By the end of 2007, the freemium business model—which included ad-supported and subscription-based tiers, with the goal of funneling users from free to paid—was created as a deep collaboration between Spotify and the [record] labels.”

Freemium as a business model has been extensively analyzed and studied to make it more effective.

hope labor

“Spotify’s emphasis on selling the feeling of potential also reflects a broader tendency of 2010s platform capitalism: the prevalence of hope labor, a term that academics have used to frame the aspirational work that users do for free in hopes that it will lead to future work.”

Similar to artists being asked to do things for “exposure,” hope labor offers merely the chance to be recognized rather than fair pay.

lean-back

“In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing.”

The opposite of “lean-back” listeners are the “lean-forward” listeners, who know what kind of music they want to listen to and actively seek it out.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!

circumnutation

In this teenage phase, hormones set the shoot tip to wandering, inscribing a circle in the air, a process known as circumnutation.

The word circumnutation comes from Latin roots meaning ‘around’ and ‘nodding’.

biocultural

It is an exemplar of a new holistic approach, called biocultural or reciprocal restoration.

Biocultural methodologies start with local cultural perspectives, taking into account those communities’ values, knowledge, and needs, and build upon them, recognizing feedback cycles between ecosystems and the health and development of people.

summerwood

These densely packed cells are called late wood or summerwood.

Summerwood is also known as latewood. Wood in a growth ring of a tree that is produced early in the growing season is known as earlywood or springwood.

aerenchyma

These white cells, called aerenchyma, are big enough to be seen with the naked eye and make a buoyant, cushiony layer at the base of each leaf.

Aerenchyma is a “spongy tissue that creates spaces or air channels in the leaves, stems and roots of some plants, which allows exchange of gases between the shoot and the root.” [Wikipedia]

phytochrome

There are photosensors by the hundreds in every single bud, packed with light-absorbing pigments called phytochromes.

“Phytochromes control many aspects of plant development. They regulate the germination of seeds (photoblasty), the synthesis of chlorophyll, the elongation of seedlings, the size, shape and number and movement of leaves and the timing of flowering in adult plants.” [Wikipedia]

holt

The wild otter I saw would no doubt be out of the water and making tracks to its own musky holt, to curl belly-upward in a home of roots, peat and rocks.

Otters’ resting-places are also sometimes called lodges or couches.

leat

Lower down, the path joins an old leat, a stone waterway engineered a hundred years ago to carry water to feed the reservoirs and tin mines.

The word ‘leat’ is more commonly found in the south and west of England, and in Wales; the word goit is more common in northern England.

spraint

There may be spraint, the otter’s droppings, nearby, and these signs can sometimes form great mounds.

Otter excrement is also sometimes called coke, because it has a black, ashy appearance. For other terms for animal droppings, check out the Wordnik list “Specific Excrement“.

stickle

In the twentieth century, sometimes a hunted otter would be trapped in the water by a line of people forming a barrier with poles. This was called a “stickle” and if caught like this the otter was less likely to escape.

In the dramatic conclusion of Tarka the Otter (an inspiration for Darlington’s own otter search), Tarka escapes from between two stickles, killing a hunting hound before swimming free.

vibrissae

From this sniff-level position I get a flash of the bristling vibrissae, the otter’s extravagant whiskers, and in a split second he catches my scent.

The word vibrissa (vibrissae is the plural) comes from a Latin word meaning ‘vibrate’.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!

augury

“The word ‘augury’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘bird talk’, for to understand the language of birds was to understand the gods.”

Montgomery’s chickens communicated with her and each other through elaborate noises that conveyed specific meanings. For more on how birds communicate, check out Barbara Ballentine and Jeremy Hyman’s Bird Talk: An Exploration of Avian Communication.

crop

“When Peanut was a year and a half old she developed a blockage in her crop–the muscular compartment where birds store and soften their food.”

The average chicken’s crop can hold about an ounce and a half of food.

ermine

“There was the skunk, and another time a mink, another time a neighbor’s dog and once an ermine. The tiny ferocious weasel in its snowy winter coat had slipped through our barn’s foundation and decapitated one of our hens.”

Keeping live chickens is an invitation to meet the local predators and Montgomery encountered plenty of wild animals eager for chicken dinners. The ermine (also called a stoat) is a common visitor to chicken coops across Europe and North America.

overpet

“Then it starts all over again, until the hen has had enough and has reached what we call “overpet.” She fluffs her feathers, shakes, and, fortified by affection, strolls off to continue her chicken day.”

Many animals have less-patient responses than chickens to overstimulation (sometimes called sensory overload).

sex crouch

“And just as the hens always do with me, she assumed her distinctive squatting posture. This is a well-known chicken behavior usually directed at a member of her own species. It is actually known as a “sex crouch.” It’s a position that a chicken normally uses to make it easy for a rooster to mount her.”

Hens will begin showing this behavior (called lordosis in mammals) when they are mature enough to start laying. When chickens see a human they know, they might squat in this position, hoping to be picked up or petted.

algospeak

“To appreciate how common it is for regular users to try to evade content moderation, consider algospeak: words or phrases that are widely understood and adopted by social media users as a way to avoid being mistakenly penalized by fickle content moderation algorithms.”

Neologism researcher Brianne Hughes has created a Wordnik list of “Algorithm Avoidant Inventions” to collect algospeak examples.

cliodynamics

“One ambitious effort is the theory of cliodynamics by Peter Turchin, which applies mathematical models to populations.”

The ‘clio-‘ of ‘cliodynamics’ comes the name of the muse of history in Greek mythology.

criti-hype

“Researcher Lee Vinsel called this phenomenon criti-hype—criticism that tends up portraying technology as all powerful instead of calling out its limitations.”

Vinsel created the word ‘criti-hype’ in a 2021 Medium post titled “You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype“.

deep learning

“In 2011, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton decided to take a crack at the ImageNet competition using neural networks, which by then had been branded “deep learning” because of the key insight that having more layers (depth) improves accuracy.”

Neural networks, despite the name, are not intended to realistically model the behavior of actual neurons.

shadowbanning

“Instead of removal, the post can be slapped with a warning, or, if it is a “borderline” policy violation, it might be silently shown to fewer users than it otherwise would. This is a notable development in the last few years known as downranking or demotion, or, colloquially, shadowbanning.”

Rich Kyanka, the creator of Something Awful, claims that the term ‘shadow ban’ was created on that forum. A 2018 explainer from Vice, “Where Did the Concept of ‘Shadow Banning’ Come From?” highlights similar practices, including ‘twit bit’, ‘bozo filter’, and ‘toading’.

Night Eating Syndrome

“Night Eating Syndrome (NES) is classified as its own eating disorder, one that affects about one in ten people who have obesity.”

NES as an eating disorder that can be comorbid with anxiety, depression, and insomnia in adult men and women. More information and help can be found on the Sleep Foundation’s website: Night Eating Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatments.

SMILF

“Frankie Shaw’s SMILF ran for two seasons on Showtime, and while the series wasn’t perfect on screen or off … the story that endeavored to tell about women parenting, class, addiction, and food was profoundly ambitious.”

Slang for “single mom I’d like to fuck,” though in some cases the “S” stands for “step” or “soccer”. In the context of the television show, the “S” represents South Boston.

fat icon

“Yes, today’s teenagers have fat icons like Paloma Elsesser, Barbie Ferreira, and Aidy Bryant to look up to, but representation can go only so far and do only so much.”

Specter posits that a handful of representatives have little influence against the global institutions selling the idea that weight loss and thinness are the only routes to happiness.

meta-shame

“I now know that what I was experiencing was what Sonia Renee Taylor refers to in her 2018 book The Body Is Not An Apology as meta-shame, or the state of feeling shame for feeling shame about our bodies.”

Specter shares that the roots of body-shaming have been difficult to eradicate, especially when she hasn’t felt she has been able to find self-acceptance in the “correct” way.

terror management

“In times of stress or fear, people focus more than usual on the things they believe they can control, this is called terror management.”

Specter discusses that during the COVID pandemic, quarantine allowed people to scrutinize their eating and food consumption (often in disordered ways) as a means to feel agency in their own lives.

bioswale

“It also likely means unbuilding structures, whether that’s relocating buildings away from shorelines facing sea-level rise and higher storm surges, or taking up the concrete around urban river and replacing it with bioswales, vegetated channels that absorb stormwater, preventing floods while removing pollutants.”

The Portland Nursery offers a PDF listing plants you can use to create bioswales (or rain gardens) in your own yard.

exogenous

“A graph of the total exogenous energy usage of humanity (that is, energy from all sources outside our own bodies) over time is flat until about 1800, after which it becomes roughly exponential, starting slowly and then rising more and more steeply.”

The word ‘exogenous’ comes ultimately from Greek roots meaning ‘born’ and ‘outside’.

externality

“Externalities, to economists, are values or costs that aren’t accounted for by the market, because they accrue to someone who isn’t part of the transaction and therefore often has no choice in whether it happens or not.”

This sense of the word ‘externality’ was first used by Alfred Marshall, a British economist, in Principles of Economics, published in 1890.

ultrastructure

“While talking through what we had seen over the course of that weekend, Charlie and I landed on the term “ultrastructure” to describe this web of social structures, all of the cultural, political, regulatory, and other systems that shape and govern infrastructure.”

Chachra talks in more depth about the idea of ‘ultrastructure’ in this interview in the excellent Scope of Work newsletter.

veneriforming

“If terraforming is taking an uninhabitable planet like Mars and changing the atmosphere to make an ecosystem capable of supporting life, we are instead taking our perfectly habitable planet and veneriforming it, transforming our terrestrial home into our other planetary next-door neighbor, suffocatingly hot Venus.”

The word ‘veneriform‘ exists in another Venus-related sense: having the shape of the shell of the Venus clam.