Weirdly specific words
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Most words have different senses and meanings depending upon the context in which they are used, hence the need for multiple definitions in dictionaries. Philip Taylor has come across this article about:
8 Words That Are Only Used in One Weirdly Specific Context
Think about it: have you ever heard someone say they had “extenuating errands”?
By Sam Hindman, Mental Floss (11/23/25)
Here they be:
- Inclement (Weather)
- Extenuating (Circumstances)
- Diametrically (Opposed)
- Bode (Well/Ill)
- Hermetically (Sealed)
- Pyrrhic (Victory)
- Batten Down (the Hatches)
- Contiguous (United States)
Philip says, "I agree with the first seven, but not with the eighth (which forms a routine part of my normal vocabulary)."
Can Language Log readers think of other applications for these eight words, or can you think of other words that are only used in narrowly specific contexts?
Selected readings
- "Whose standard?" (8/28/08) — "title", "entitle", etc.
- "Literal and figurative language" (Wikipedia)
- "What do broad and narrow mean in the context?" (English Language & Usage [Stack Exchange])
There are many other approaches one could take to this topic.
wordist said,
November 23, 2025 @ 10:23 am
ngrams is great for this https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=inclement+*&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
Also some of these have been appropriated into technical uses
bode plot
hermetically packed
James said,
November 23, 2025 @ 10:26 am
Extenuating evidence.
Admittedly about 1% of the frequency of 'extenuating circumstance' (according to ngram viewer), but far from unheard of.
Philip Taylor said,
November 23, 2025 @ 10:27 am
Ah yes, a Bode plot — I had forgotten that they exist ! But I think that "hermetically packed" means exactly the same (or as near as d@mnit) as "hermetically sealed", would you not agree ?
Mark Liberman said,
November 23, 2025 @ 10:54 am
There are many online search possibilities — a good one for this purpose is https://www.english-corpora.org/, which has English-language datasets between 50 million and 23.5 billion words, and will produce random samples of specified sizes from search results.
For example, a random sample of 100 results for 'hermetically" from the billion-word COCA corpus yields "hermetically packed", "hermetically isolated", "hermetically perfect", "hermetically isolated", "hermetically constituted", "hermetically self-involved", "hermetically closed", "hermetically encapsulated", "hermetically packaged", "hermetically closed and caulked", "the Turkish closing their border more hermetically", and "this discourse does not develop hermetically".
So (100-12)/100 = 88%.
These days, people shouldn't create and spread these memes without checking the actual facts, since it's so easy to do.
Eric Armstrong said,
November 23, 2025 @ 11:03 am
Of course Pyrrhic is used to describe the “pyrrhic foot” in poetic meter, being a foot with 2 unstressed syllables, frequently paired with a spondee with 2 stressed syllables.
Philip Taylor said,
November 23, 2025 @ 11:08 am
Ah, that one (a pyrrhic foot) I was unaware of, Eric.
Stephen Goranson said,
November 23, 2025 @ 11:31 am
I concluded Mental Floss was not reliable in one early article and know no reason to think it reliable now. Admittedly, I am not a frequent reader of it, given my early experience.
ardj said,
November 23, 2025 @ 11:43 am
Looking through corpora is a wearisome business, but the OED is some help here. For example:
“Pope Clement the fift. Was inclement and cruell (1621, Molle), subjecting people to “an inclement fate” (1725, Pope), presumably by tossing them into “a rough inclement ocean”(1861, Noble)
"A too solicitous extenuating the provision is all one as if thou shouldst boast of it” (1671 HM tr, Erasmus)
“The Vapour … cannot penetrate the Stratum diametrically” (1695, Woodman), for
”Its breadth, measured diametrically”(1794,Taylor) “… cannot always be followed out straight and diametrically" (1826 Scott), presumably because of “The molecules, which he represents diametrically” (1899 Nature)
But I dinna' bode any thanks for a this
Oracles said,
November 23, 2025 @ 12:03 pm
"Bode plot" doesn't fit the pattern, as "Bode" is someone's name in this usage…
Philip Taylor said,
November 23, 2025 @ 12:12 pm
Well, one could argue that "Pyrrhic victory" falls into the same category, Oracles — after all, the victory takes its name from Pyrrhus of Epirus.
Mark Liberman said,
November 23, 2025 @ 12:26 pm
@ardj "Looking through corpora is a wearisome business":
That used to be true — but now: Running the query for "hermetically" on COCA and making a random sample of 100 took a bit less than 3 seconds. Looking down the sample for non-"seal-" uses took about a minute. And the advantage is a plausible estimate of the usage proportions…
I'm a fan of the OED as well, but in a case like this, COCA corpus search + random sampling is something that anyone interested in word usage should know how to do.
Philip Taylor said,
November 23, 2025 @ 12:29 pm
Except, of course, that in the Pyrrhic case, there are senses of "Pyrrhic" (of which I am aware) that are not derived from the name of Pyrrhus of Epirus. My previous comment clearly posted without first engaging brain.
Leslie Katz said,
November 23, 2025 @ 12:39 pm
Lawyers often refer to pieces of land as contiguous.
David L said,
November 23, 2025 @ 12:41 pm
I'm reminded of one of Dave Barry's 'Mr Grammar' columns, where in response to the (fake) question, "what does it mean to say something bodes well" he replied "it means it isn't boding badly."
Julian Hook said,
November 23, 2025 @ 12:49 pm
What about "impending," which is almost never followed by anything other than "doom" (or possibly a near-synonym such as "disaster")? I don't think I've ever seen any form of the verb "impend" other than the -ing form.
Mark Liberman said,
November 23, 2025 @ 12:58 pm
@Julian Hook "I don't think I've ever seen any form of the verb "impend" other than the -ing form":
The non -ing forms are certain rare, but they do occur, as any internet search will show. As for what can impend besides doom and disaster, there are many things like these quotes from COCA:
But they profoundly fear the anarchy that now impends — as a threat to Russian democracy itself.
The impending launch of business pages
The Froggies (Las Ranas), who set the stage for the impending fun.
My sister's impending marriage to Edward made me happy
symbolizing the impending birth of a pure spiritual being
it would be awesome if his impending album sold a million copies.
Linda said,
November 23, 2025 @ 1:18 pm
There is also a method of working handknit jumpers known as contiguous knitting.
sam said,
November 23, 2025 @ 2:20 pm
'Hermetically' has picked up some technical use in computing, though I wouldn't be surprised if most of that was in the phrase 'build hermetically' and conjugations thereof.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 23, 2025 @ 3:04 pm
The "adjective "hermetic" has developed a variety of senses, of which some may be more likely to carry over to frequent adverbial use than others. For example, the adjectival sense of "hermetic" used in "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn" may not lend itself to adverbial use as I don't think the reputed advice of Hermes Trismegistus on how to seal vessels tightly was the primary H.T. association the order's founders were seeking to evoke.
The google books ngram viewer indicates that in that corpus "diametrically opposed" was not even more frequent than the very similar "diametrically opposite" until 1936, and the "opposite" version remains in active use, although "opposed" is now more frequent than it by about a 3:1 ratio. OTOH looking at the first three pages of hits for "hermetically" in texts coded in a single year (2010, although of course the metadata is sometimes inaccurate) yielded 25 hits w/ "sealed," 1 with "closed' as an obvious synonym of "sealed," and only one each for two others ("secluded" and "separated").
Obviously phrasing a claim as "word X never appears other than in conjunction with word Y" makes it much easier to falsify than phrasing it as "word X occurs overwhelmingly in conjunction with word Y."
Yves Rehbein said,
November 23, 2025 @ 3:13 pm
opposable (thumbs)?
I thought about this for some lengths of time in the context of Abstand-Sprachen because I remember abstehende Daumen (obsolete German for opposable thumbs, the concept is not nearly as common over here, "opponierbar" notwithstanding) and the saying to stick out like a sore thumb seemed ripe for a pun, but then a sore thumb is not a problem I can relate to. Or do you have used sore thumb outside of the fixed idiom? By the way, it took me three different tries to confirm I am hallucinating. Try a corpus search. Dictionaries are no help and ChatGPT suggested that "distant" thumbs might be a medical condition :D
Julian said,
November 23, 2025 @ 4:01 pm
Condign punishment?
[Question mark because sorry Mark I haven't looked up the corpus]
Jonathan Smith said,
November 23, 2025 @ 4:23 pm
What J.W. Brewer said about framing the claim and also — rather than "weirdly specific words," the issue is idiomatic — practically lexical — collocations in which the "weird words" happen to have been maintained (with some "other" uses actually back-formed from the collocation.) Cf. "kith and kin", "to and fro" etc. where "kith" and "fro" are not exactly "weirdly specific words."
J.W. Brewer said,
November 23, 2025 @ 4:44 pm
Right now google has four hits for "diametrically opposed thumbs" and zero for "diametrically opposable thumbs." So it looks like "oppos*" can participate in multiple fixed phrases but usually only one at a time.
Peter Taylor said,
November 23, 2025 @ 5:09 pm
For diametrically, mathematicians use it in its plain sense of "relating to diameters" in phrases such as diametrically minimal, diametrically symmetric, and even diametrically squeezed. (All examples taken from mathoverflow.net).
To me, the most salient noun for the adjective contiguous is range. Contiguous has even more hits on MathOverflow than diametrically, including quite a lot for Gauss's contiguous relations for hypergeometric functions, which get a section title in Wikipedia. The adjective is also applied quite a lot to sequence / subsequence / subword.
Contiguous probably also wins the prize for biggest fail in the article when checked against a corpus: generously, 2/249 hits in BNC. The generosity is in counting "America's 48 contiguous states" as close enough to "contiguous United States". It's far from 100% in COCA too, but with 1333 hits and a far lower proportion which are talking about cephalopod anatomy, that's more effort to count…
Roscoe said,
November 23, 2025 @ 5:12 pm
(Fine) Fettle
AntC said,
November 23, 2025 @ 5:17 pm
I've read a story (possibly P G Wodehouse, but not Jeeves & Wooster) in which somebody complains their egg is addled, then goes on to muse how 'addled' is used only of eggs. Much later somebody counters with addled brains. Wiktionary shows a few other connected usages.
Charles Antaki said,
November 23, 2025 @ 6:01 pm
Not quite unique usages, but very strongly reminiscent of Flann O'Brien's catechisms –
Is a man ever hurt in a motor crash?
No. He sustains an injury.
Does such a man ever die of his injuries?
No. He succumbs to them.
From what sort of time does a custom date?
Time immemorial.
To what serious things does an epidemic sometimes attain?
Proportions.
KevinM said,
November 23, 2025 @ 6:25 pm
@AntC – possibly a humorous play on coddled?
Chester Draws said,
November 24, 2025 @ 2:09 am
"Akimbo" is a weirdly specific word.
It's not like you can't say "hands on hips".
Julian said,
November 24, 2025 @ 2:11 am
@Antc
One of the marvellous things about language, in my humble opinion, is that there are so many *pointlessly* rare and specialised words – pointless in the sense that some commoner word of broader meaning could fit the bill perfectly well (not saying it would be an exact synomym, just that it would serve the communicative purpose well enough).
In other words, why is the dictionary *so* big? Is this feature similar in all languages? How did it evolve?
Favourite example: to my knowledge there are only two things in the entire world that can be 'stubbed': toes and cigarettes. Am I right?
Lasius said,
November 24, 2025 @ 3:41 am
Bode Museum
Richard Hershberger said,
November 24, 2025 @ 5:40 am
In the ancient history context we read of the "Pyrrhic War," where those victories occurred. Pyrrhus of course fought more than one war, but the "Pyrrhic War" is the one with Rome, since who cares about those other ones?
David Morris said,
November 24, 2025 @ 6:27 am
Wikipedia's article on Pyrrhus says 'Several of his victorious battles caused him unacceptably heavy losses, from which the phrase "Pyrrhic victory" was coined', but the article on Pyrrhic victory specifies the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC.
The internet has various usages of 'Pyrrhic defeat' and 'Pyrrhic loss', which presumably should be called a 'Roman defeat'.
Duncan said,
November 24, 2025 @ 6:34 am
@ Julian re stubs/stubbing:
In your usage I've "stubbed" a finger a few times (as well as stapling one to a crossbar once when I worked in a furniture factory — FWIW common staple-glue actually has added anti-tetanus/antibiotic precisely for that eventuality).
More to the point, perhaps you're afflicted with the "context narrowing" that I sometimes get, where in the presence of some context I suddenly can't think of any other. Because "stub" has a number of common usage contexts expanding from Middle English (according to the wictionary entry) from its original "tree stump" reference. Mostly from wictionary:
* Paper stubs: check/pay stub (I suppose only occurring to those of us of a certain age…), ticket stub…
* Programming: Function stubs (original reply trigger as my first thought beyond "stubbed toe/finger"): "A placeholder procedure that has the signature of the planned procedure but does not yet implement the intended behavior." (wictionary) This is extremely common both during initial implementation to enable testing before fully coding it out, and when changing mature library and kernel implementations to maintain existing API when the original functionality has been subsumed either inline or into a new functionally-expanded version.
* Transit: Stub rail lines and highway ramps. Stub bus/rail/air/ship routes (usually the route-fraction between the last interconnect and the turn-around, but can also refer to a very short "bridge route" convenience-connecting two major routes).
* Wiki: Stub article: All those "This is a stub" entries…
* Animal: Stub tail/arm/leg/finger/toe: The stub remaining after docking a tail or losing part of a finger/toe or limb.
* Candle stub.
That's listing only the usages I'm personally familiar enough with that I could see myself using without further thought.
Julian Macdonald said,
November 24, 2025 @ 6:58 am
@Duncan
I was thinking of the verb, not the noun.
Victor Mair said,
November 24, 2025 @ 7:31 am
"arms akimbo"
I love that one and have been intrigued by its high degree of specificity since I was a kid. I wonder if any other language in the world — except perhaps some Germanic congener(s) — have a word that means exactly the same thing.
It's a good term that fulfills a useful purpose.
From Middle English in kenebowe, in kene bowe (“in a keen bow”, i.e. “in a sharp bend or angle”), from in (“in”) + keen, kene (“brave, keen, sharp”) + bowe (“bow, bend”). Alternately, possibly from Old Norse kengr (“bent”) + bogi (“a bow”), compare Icelandic kengboginn (“bow-bent”). (Wiktionary)
Sciamanna said,
November 24, 2025 @ 8:04 am
Re "arms akimbo": Italian has "a braccia conserte", where conserte Is the oddly specific word. I don't have an Italian corpus handy, but I'm pretty confident I've never heard it in any other collocation.
(Google shows me some results for "Mani conserte", which is hands clasped together with alternating fingers – it makes sense but I'd never seen it before)
Linda Seebach said,
November 24, 2025 @ 8:13 am
I recently saw "akimbo" applied to legs, or knees . . . in a crossword clue for "manspreading."
Victor Mair said,
November 24, 2025 @ 9:15 am
I remember translating a Chinese story in which I used the English expression "arms akimbo". Retracing my steps, I found that the equivalent Chinese expression was "chāyāo 叉腰" ("crossed / propped / stuck / forked at the waist / hips").
Here's a full sentence using the term:
=====
tā shuāng shǒu chāyāo zhànzhe, zhòuzhe méitóu kànzhe xiǎo nánhái
她雙手叉腰站著，皺著眉頭看著小男孩
"She stood with her hands on her hips, frowning as she looked at the little boy."
=====
Robert Coren said,
November 24, 2025 @ 10:08 am
Counter-example to @Julian's "condign punishment", from Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado: "With grief condign, I must decline."
I encountered somewhere once (in a murder mystery, most likely) a description of a body being found with "arms and legs akimbo", from which I concluded that the word the writer really wanted was "askew".
VVOV said,
November 24, 2025 @ 10:09 am
"Akimbo" also has a video-game-subculture-specific usage that refers to wielding/firing 2 guns, one in each hand. The most mainstream usage of this was in the title of the 2019 movie "Guns Akimbo", starring Daniel Radcliffe.
Wiktionary's page for "akimbo" has this (not cited) example of the usage: "Although it was a little impractical, Elmer held his revolvers akimbo because to him it looked cool."
J.W. Brewer said,
November 24, 2025 @ 10:33 am
In my experience (which seems to be confirmed by a few online dictionaries) a cigarette can be stubbed out but can't just be stubbed. I would think of the phrasal verb "to stub out" as a different lexical entry than the verb "to stub." That verb apparently does have a horticultural sense or at least it once did, as in the phrase "make a sort of stubbed bush of them," found in the 1893 annual report of the Minnesota State Horticultural Society. Or the more recent "with branches stubbed back," from a gardening book published in 2000. And a recent lexicon of Wiltshire regional lexemes (by Dartnell & Goddard) has the phrasal verb "to stub off," glossed as "to cut off a bush or tree close to the ground." Being listed in that sort of reference work, however, suggests that the horticultural sense of "stub" may be archaic in more general BrEng.
Scott P. said,
November 24, 2025 @ 10:43 am
Before Pyrrhos of Epiros, the term for a costly victory was a Kadmeian victory, after the legendary King Kadmos of Thebes.
David L said,
November 24, 2025 @ 11:08 am
I had some old-school carpenters working in my basement a while back, and they talked repeatedly of stubbing new joists into the existing beams. On investigation, I learned that a stub tenon is a tenon that doesn't go all the way through the beam, and to insert a joist in this way is to stub it in. A specialized use, I admit.
Ari said,
November 24, 2025 @ 12:15 pm
I see "contiguous" fairly often in two other phrases:
contiguous memory or disk space – in computers, it's inefficient to have a collection of data scattered here and there throughout memory or disk. Much better to allocate one uninterrupted span that's big enough to hold the whole thing.
a contiguous block of seats – what you request when your group wants to be sure to sit together at the theater, on a plane, or the like
J.W. Brewer said,
November 24, 2025 @ 1:02 pm
Not only are there other common uses of "contiguous," I'm not sure how often most people use it to refer to a specified portion of the U.S. It's nothing like a semi-cliche similar to "batten down the hatches" or "extenuating circumstances." Indeed, whether the CON in the relevant U.S. military acronym CONUS really stands for "contiguous" or not is apparently disputed. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/CONUS I personally prefer the more colloquial "Lower 48" for the same referent (where "lower" is more or less from the point of view of Alaska), but it's just not a referent I have very frequent occasion to specify.
Julian said,
November 24, 2025 @ 4:23 pm
'Why is the dictionary *so* big?"
Also, 'rare' in the sense of 'way way down the word frequency list' does not necessarily mean learned or marked as unusual or 'typical native speakers might not understand it'.
In COCA at the 5000 mark (that's as far as I can see for free, it seems) there are still plenty of ordinary everyday words (subjective impression. Of course they may be more common in speech than writing.)
How much further down the list does that observation hold true? I think of the declining frequency of primes among the numbers.
Subjective impression again: plenty of very rare words are still alive and well in the community of native speakers (if not for every native speaker). "Akimbo" is a good example. They show no sign of reaching a sort of event horizon of unsustainable rarity where they disappear. Contrast the way the list of irregular verbs has shrunk over the centuries as rarer irregular forms disappear.
Of course I can't see the words that *have* disappeared.
Michael Watts said,
November 24, 2025 @ 9:41 pm
This doesn't do much to convince me that it's possible to use a form other than "impending". It does do a lot to convince me that the "Corpus of Colloquial American" has lost track of what "colloquial" means.
Fred said,
November 25, 2025 @ 4:02 am
moot? salient?
Robin said,
November 25, 2025 @ 6:39 am
To reinforce an above comment, in computer programming "stub" is a very common noun for something temporarily implemented. For me it has the feeling of something short that will eventually be long.
Andreas Johansson said,
November 25, 2025 @ 6:56 am
Google finds roughly 1/20 as many instances of "inclement conditions" as of "inclement weather", and judging from the first page it's largely used in the very same meteorological context as the commoner expression.
I agree with everyone though that "contiguous" is the really oddity on the list. The compiler must have a rather different exposure to English than I have, perhaps involving fewer mathematics textbooks.
Philip Taylor said,
November 25, 2025 @ 7:09 am
Not sure if you are suggesting "moot" and "salient" as candidates, Robin, but if you are, then (a) one can "moot" something, as well as something being "a moot point", and (b) "salient" has military uses (and, I believe, origins).
ajay said,
November 25, 2025 @ 11:44 am
"Indeed, whether the CON in the relevant U.S. military acronym CONUS really stands for "contiguous" or not is apparently disputed."
I had always assumed it meant "continental" – intended to exclude Hawaii, Guam and other island colonies. "Continental United States" is certainly much commoner on Ngrams. Different bits of the US government appear to disagree on whether CONUS includes Alaska.
A pedant would also point out that if CONUS means "contiguous United States" then it would exclude not only Alaska and Hawaii but also most of New York City. Long Island is part of the continent of North America but it isn't contiguous with the mainland any more than Hawaii is.
ajay said,
November 25, 2025 @ 11:50 am
Batten Down (the Hatches)
Google it and you'll find people talking about battening down things other than hatches. Mainly roofing fabric like felt, which needs to be held in place with battens.
It also means "to feed or nourish". (There hath he lain for ages and will lie/ Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep" – Tennyson, "The Kraken".)
KWillets said,
November 25, 2025 @ 12:25 pm
Contiguous memory, space, allocation, and disk all spike around 1980, with space having an additional peak around 1960. All exceed "contiguous united" by a significant margin.
The reason that these phrases have grown with the computer boom is rather insidious: accessing non-contiguous memory is as slow as it was 40 years ago, roughly.
Michael Gilbert-Koplow said,
November 25, 2025 @ 2:37 pm
I now use "take care" as a farewell greeting. When I was young, it was a cautionary utterance, as in "Take care, O Whoever, lest thou whatever'st."
Kris said,
November 25, 2025 @ 3:21 pm
I've always thought twiddle was "weirdly specific" in that the only thing one ever twiddles is one's thumbs (IME). The uselessness of the word just about matches the uselessness of the action itself.
Gokul Madhavan said,
November 25, 2025 @ 10:23 pm
@ajay: Like you, I have always taken CONUS to mean “continental US”. Your point on the ambiguity concealed in the word “contiguous” is well taken: If we take it at the level of states sharing boundaries (as, I think, we do implicitly), then the islands of the Lower 48 states will also be included. If, however, we take it geographically (as you suggest), then Long Island and Rhode Island and any number of other islets and eyots
would all be excluded. We might also take it to mean regions that are accessible by land transportation (road, rail, etc.), in which case Long Island would be contiguous with the mainland, but the Harbor Islands off the coast of Boston or Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles would not be.
HS said,
November 25, 2025 @ 11:30 pm
"Halcyon days"
Doubtless there will be some occurrences of "halcyon weeks", "halcyon months", and "halcyon years", but I've only ever heard "halcyon days". (A very quick Google search throws up lots of brand names and book titles, and I couldn't be bothered searching through them all.)
@Kris
one can also twiddle a lock of hair or a radio knob.
Isoraķatheð said,
November 26, 2025 @ 3:23 am
"Elapsed". Only a time period can elapse. This is one of the very few words in English that you can say type checks its arguments.
Victor Mair said,
November 26, 2025 @ 9:02 am
Reminds me of "prolapse", when some part of the body, usually in the pelvic region, protrudes from where it belongs into another space inside or outside of the body.
Killer said,
November 26, 2025 @ 5:26 am
Nowadays "existential crisis" is in constant use. "Existential" is used with other words, of course, but I would nominate it for Word of the Year, because it's been inescapable in 2025.
Philip Taylor said,
November 26, 2025 @ 6:24 am
I would second that nomination, Killer. Everything seemingly became "existential" on the radio during 2025.
Robert Coren said,
November 26, 2025 @ 10:01 am
@Gokul Madhavan: Rhode Island, despite its name, is not an island, although it includes some islands (as do all pretty much all the states with coastlines). Treating those islands as not part of the "contiguous US" would feel pretty strange to me.
Stephen said,
November 26, 2025 @ 10:48 am
Unrequited love.
Google ngrams.
Does any other service offer ngrams, or only Google?
Google ngrams doesn’t have unrequited hate. Unrequited service is rare, and gets a giant bump around 1875.
It also has no hits for unrequited hit, hits, offer, twin, contagion, germ, germs, infection, battle, dual, duel.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 26, 2025 @ 3:46 pm
@Robert Coren. One of the islands included within the state of Rhode Island is the island officially known as "Rhode Island," thus creating an ambiguity. Many folks do apparently call that island by its alternative name of Aquidneck and thus avoid the problem. Islands, of course, can be present in any state, even if not coastal, as long as there's at least one lake-or-river with at least one island in it. The internet can help you learn about, e.g., Wild Horse Island in Montana or Arbuckle Island, in Arkansas. One of those looks to be reachable from the "mainland" by a bridge but the other not.
I think the issue with CONUS is that it did originate from "CONtinental United States" but that phrase was conventionally understood to exclude Alaska. This naturally led to objections from logically-minded peevers insisting that Alaska is, in fact, located on the same continent as the 48 other non-Hawaiian states, which led to semi-widespread reinterpretation of CONUS as "CONtiguous United States" in an effort to humor the peevers. But apparently that just led to a new round of peeves about whether Queens is really contiguous to the Bronx when there appears to be water, albeit crossed by multiple bridges, in between them.
ajay said,
November 27, 2025 @ 8:06 am
I think the peevers (unlike me) may have been motivated by more than just sterile pedantry, because the US government gives you things like separation allowance and relocation allowance and so on at different levels depending on whether you're moving from place to place within CONUS, or to or from somewhere outside CONUS. So a rigorous definition of CONUS carries quite a bit of financial weight.
I suppose that talking about the "Lower 48" could, if you were inclined, be held to exclude the District of Columbia…
ajay said,
November 27, 2025 @ 8:12 am
Unrequited love.
Ngrams shows that passion, affection, desire, need, infatuation, hunger, thirst, and (rarely) feelings and sentiment can also be unrequited, but not much else.
Peter Taylor said,
November 28, 2025 @ 4:42 am
@Stephen, Google Ngrams finds both unrequited hate and the peever-preferred unrequited hatred, but both with a frequency several orders of magnitude less than that of unrequited love.
Catching Up | Namely JT said,
December 1, 2025 @ 5:06 am
[…] over on Language Log there’s a post looking at words that are only used in one specific context. Like “inclement”, for example. Have you ever heard it modify a noun other than […]