标签: formication

I am quite fond of words. I enjoy the way they roll around my head and drip off my tongue. I was watching an episode of Law and Order on television the other day -- the original one with Sam Waterston playing Jack McCoy -- when Jack's boss dropped "the nattering nabobs of negativism" into the conversation and I thought "Oooh, I wish I'd said that!" (Hmmm, what was that Monty Python sketch in which someone says: "Shaw said that!"?)   All this goes to explain why I spend so much time on the Dictionary.com website, and also on its Thesaurus.com sister site. It's a rare day indeed that doesn’t see me visiting both sites to look up the meaning of a word, or its origin and history, or its synonyms and antonyms.   I've also signed up for Dictionary.com's "Word of the Day" email. Most of the time I know the words, but sometimes I'm completely stumped. Furthermore, every now and then my eyes deceive me and my mind substitutes another word for what I'm seeing.   Take the other day, for example, when the word of the day was "Formication." For some reason I read this as something completely different. However, it turns out that formication is the medical term for a sensation that resembles that of small insects crawling on (or under) the skin. I'm glad my 20-year old son hasn’t heard of this one -- he's a bit of a hypochondriac, and once the thought was in his head...   As an aside, a couple of years ago I purchased a copy of The Hypochondriac's Pocket Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have , and every year I don't give it to my son for Christmas (LOL).   Even the definition of formication can be deceiving, because this word is derived from formica , which I now discover is the Latin word for "ant," but which I originally took to be a type of plastic tabletop.   Of course, rhyming words are now rattling around my noggin and strange phrases are popping into my mind -- things like "The isolation and desperation associated with the aberration of formication." Trust me; you wouldn’t want to live in my head.   Other recent "Words of the Day" have included spondulicks, magniloquent, and Pickwickian. I tell you, English is such a beautiful language that it brings a tear to my eye. I'm reminded of that line "Student of our sweet English tongue" from the poem To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence by James Elroy Flecker.   What's the most apposite word you can think of that rhymes with "formication"? What's your favorite English word? And do you know the only English word where the letter combination "ph" actually sounds like 'p' followed by 'h' and not 'f'?