ONOMASTIC FANTASTIC
Glossing over my glossary

The answer, I'm sad to say, is yes.

A few years back I worked for a college board test prep company. My job involved writing SAT Verbal-style test questions for the company's nascent line of CD-ROM products, employing liberally words like nascent.

This was, as you might imagine, not the most pleasant way to spend 40 hours a week. Or, to phrase it in the ETS style,

To pass the time -- and there was plenty of time -- I read the dictionary. If my boss asked, I was researching for my writing assignment. But really I was trolling for cool words, words that were fun and expressive and, by and large, unfit for diurnal use.

Recently I stumbled upon my lexis, which comprised 50 some odd entries in a steno notebook. Some of them are words that should be in the popular patois, yet remain generally unspoken. I'd like to share these with you.

You know when you get in an argument with someone -- your friend Chris, say -- and he comes up with a real zinger that totally shuts you up, and when you're on the toilet two hours later you think of something really clever you should have said? Well, there's an expression for that feeling: esprit de l'escalier. You'll find it in the "Foreign Words & Phrases" section of better dictionaries. The literal translation is "wit of the staircase," but the meaning is, from Merriam Webster, "repartee thought of only too late, on the way home."

The French have always been extreme liberals concerning censorship -- they have 120 Days of Sodom, we have 120 Psalms -- and hold their language sacrosanct. And why shouldn't they? There are many great French turns of phrase that simply do not have an English equivalent. Bon appetit is a well-known example. Here are some obscure ones:

jolie laide
Leave it to the French to come up with an elegant term for a conventionally unattractive but nonetheless comely woman. Think Sandra Bernhard.

à deux
Flip on the radio and you're bound to hear some benighted crooner or diva employ the phrase "alone with you." This, friends, is a contradiction in terms. Our chaperone-happy society never bothered to come up with a more appropriate phraseology, so "alone with you" raises nary an eyebrow. Happily, the French (who, if language is any indication, have had a lot more fun than have we Puritanical Americans) offer a simple solution: à deux. Just the two of us, building castles in the sky. Just the two of us, you and I.

jeunesse dorée
The young, rich, stylish crowd. In New York, they hang out at Moomba, drink bellinis, and are tutoyer with Leo.

tutoyer
In French, there are two forms of address: formal and casual. Tutoyer is a verb meaning, in effect, being on a first-name basis (with someone). The difference between calling someone "sir" and calling him "dude."

faute de mieux
Pronounced FOE DUH MYUH, this charming phrase means "for want of something better or more sensible." Can be used to modify a sentence like: "We went to see the new Tom Green movie."

nostalgie de la boue
The literal translation is "yearning for the mud," but the actual meaning is more complex. This refers to the irrational attraction people have for all things seedy, squalid, and disreputeable. Prince Hal is a famous literary exemplar. Nostalgie de la boue is the reason dive bars exist, and do so well.

Cunning linguists though they are, the French have not cornered the market on cool words. Here are a few others that, with some prodding, could experience a renascence:

dysphemism
The opposite of euphemism. Kicked the bucket for dead, shrink for psychologist, ball and chain for wife.

uxorious
Overly fond of, or submissive to, one's wife/girlfriend. Someone who would never use the above-referenced dysphemism. The polite way to say whipped.

sartorial
Of, or relating to, clothes. A favorite of garmentos.

cachinnate
You know when you make a joke and someone laughs really loud and a lot longer than the joke deserved? That's cachinnation.

janissary
What WASPs have instead of posses.

Hawthorne effect
You spend a lot less time surfing the Net when your boss is watching. This is not a coincidence; it's the Hawthorne effect.

cacography
Really lousy handwriting.

turnophile
A connosseur of cheese. Not used much in this country, where people eat Velveeta. I would love to expand it to all definitons of cheese. To wit: An admitted turnophile, she loved The Bridges of Madison County.

philodox
Someone is love with his or her own opinions. For a good example, check out Brady's column last week.

bathos
My favorite word in the English language. Greek for anticlimax, but I read it to mean a profound, life-altering anticlimax. The Billy Joel concert sucking is anticlimactic; realizing that the Promised Land, which you finally arrived at after facing many dangers, toils, and snares, is really just a polluted marsh a mile downriver from Newark -- that's bathetic.