As practice for the famous NANOWRIMO, a prompts list of unusual and rare words! I’ll try writing them: will you?
- Uncanny: strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way
- Chimerical: merely imaginary; fanciful
- Susurrus: a whispering or rustling sound
- Aubade: a song greeting the dawn
- Ephemeral: lasting a very short time
- Sempiternal: everlasting; eternal
- Euphonious: pleasing; sweet in sound
- Billet-doux: a love letter
- Pluviophile: any organism that thrives in conditions of heavy rainfall; one who loves rain, a rain-lover
- Redamancy: act of loving in return
- Lachesism: the desire to be struck by disaster; to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire
- Rubatosis: the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat
- Nodus Tollens: the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore
- Opia: the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable
- Monachopsis: the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place
- Énouement: the bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self
- Skulduggery: devious behavior
- Tatterdemalion: raggedly dressed person; looking disreputable or decayed
- Athazagoraphobia: the feeling of being forgotten, ignored, or replaced
- Oblivion: the state of being completely forgotten or unknown; connotes feelings of isolation and aloofness, which lead to the annihilation or extinction of the self metaphorically
- Abditory: a hiding, safe place to disappear
- Hiraeth: the homesickness for a home you can never return to; a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past
- Fernweh: the ache for distant places; the craving for travel
- Sonder: the realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own
- Kenopsia: the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet
- Kuebiko: a state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence
- Quiddity: the essence or inherent nature of a person or thing / an eccentricity; an odd feature / a trifle; a nicety or quibble
- Wayfarer: a traveler, especially on foot
- Nepenthe: a medicine for sorrow; a place, person or thing, which can aid in forgetting your pain and suffering
- Gloaming: defined as twilight and dusk; the day’s end, the glittery, transient echo when time and nature meet
- Eunoia: literally meaning “beautiful thinking” / FREE SPACE
Day 1: October 1, 2017. Uncanny.
Senyor pointed to the scrambled data on the spreadsheet. “You can see that it’s wrong.”
Natale shifted in his seat and leaned forward to get a look at the numbers. Senyor Pen Brindoto, his immediate superior, tapped the papers with two heavy fingers and slid them back towards Natale, a disgruntled look on his fleshy face.
“Well,” Natale started, “it’s within our predicted margins of error. Not every test is going to come back with perfect results.”
“Run it again,” Brindoto snapped. He leaned back into his well-cushioned leather desk chair and folded his hands across his broad chest.
Natale nodded, grabbed the papers, stood. He gave a little bow and made to exit the office.
“Oh, and Correvís?”
Natale turned to see Brindoto lighting a cigar. “Yes, Senyor?”
Brindoto puffed once, then poked the smoking brown cylinder at Natale and said, “Don’t fuck it up this time.”
Natale scurried out into the hallway, keeping his head down as he beelined back to the laboratory. Nobody bothered him, dressed as he was in a gray uniform that displayed, in its lack of labels, his own lack of importance. He pondered the dataset as he wove through the flow of human traffic in the halls, the technicians with their spectacularly-striped jumpsuits, the lecturers in tweed, the analysts in sober black. He blended into the metal-and-stone walls, floors, low ceilings. For efficiency’s sake, he hopped onto a conveyer belt headed north, to the experimental wing of Pilar Badahos, the professional research university where he worked and lived. It housed many others, but he had left and returned, unlike most. That made it his home.
The northbound belt took him there quickly, and he disembarked with a dozen men and women on foot into the experimental wing. His lab was a tiny addition to the wing, bursting with equipment and dimly lit. He keyed in his passcode to enter.
“Profe,” Ambria said in surprise as she looked up from her sketchbook. “That was quick. What happened? You took the printout and left so fast….”
“I had to report to Senyor Brindoto about our progress,” he told her, shoving the papers into a basket on his desk. There was not much open space on it, covered as it was in scrap metal, assemblage tools, and his own scribbled notes.
“And?”
She was far too eager, even for a graduate student. Natale would not have hired her had he known about her disposition beforehand. He himself preferred silence, and no questions, in his place of work.
“We should take a look at the methodology again,” he said. “I might have made a mistake in my initial problem formulation.”
She said, pushed a strand of dark hair behind her hoop-shaped ears.
“What have you been working on?” he asked, deflecting another round of questions.
She flipped her sketchbook so he could see. It was a simple design, not like her previous ones which were all water colors and complicated tangles of limbs and wires.
“How are you going to solve the uncanny valley problem?”
“That’s your issue, not mine,” she said, huffing a little. “Its face is perfectly human.”
“Yes, but building an android that looks like that…we’re still going to have issues during a human interaction trial. Why can’t you come up with something less…lifelike?”
“The point is integration, Profe!”
“Well,” he said, a nervous flutter in his stomach, “integration is only good if people aren’t scared. People are scared of what they don’t understand, and a humanoid robot is hard to get. People like cute things, stuff that’s clearly not real. Maybe an animal? What about a…a bird? Or a spider?”
“People are terrified of spiders,” she scoffed.
Write-O-Ween Prompts: Unusual and Rare Words Edition
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MissWriteress 