This is a 'sensory homunculus,' representing the parts of the body that are most sensitive. (Some words have different meanings.)

In a career built on words, there are a few words I’ve always wanted to use but couldn’t.  My subject matter was never quite big enough, my life large enough. For example, I have always wanted to use the word “metastasis,“  or “exegesis,”  or “protean.  I remember coming across them in Time or NewsWeek or some similarly weighty periodical as their  writers ever so writerly recounted, analyzed, or dissected an event, development, or trend.

Words like that resonate with gravitas, entirely apropos to a corrupt presidentcy, a constitutional crisis,  or an unpopular land war in Southeast Asia.

I’ve been thinking about big words because I just finished reading an Economist article that used two I wish I could find the occasion to employ.  The story was entitled “The frat boy ships out,” about our recently departed 43rd president.

The first word was “ratiocination.”  The Economist used it thusly:

Mr Bush is what the British call an inverted snob. A scion of one of America’s most powerful families, he is a devotee of sunbelt populism; a product of Yale and Harvard Business School, he is a scourge of eggheads. Mr Bush is a convert to an evangelical Christianity that emphasises emotion—particularly the intensely emotional experience of being born again—over ratiocination.

Or how about this for a word?  It’s “homunculi,“  the plural of homunculus.

[Read more...]