Fun with Words c6d480

I have become more attuned to new words since starting my Fun with Words series ^1. I was listening to an episode of This Week in Tech yesterday and I heard an interesting word. I stopped to note down the word for future reference, perhaps for inclusion in a future edition of this series. Today, I have four words for you that I have gathered from the depths of digital media after extensive reading and evaluation, specially curated for your edification. (I was going for the verbosity associated with an episode in Stephen Colbert's Meanwhile series in that last sentence ^2. Colbert really does a great job at the humorous run on sentence in that series.)

The new words for today are:

• Mellifluous: A smooth sound.
• Initialism: An abbreviation where each letter is pronounced individually such as in the case of US, CES, or PDF.
• Transverse: Across.
• Commentariat: A group of people commenting on an event, often used in the contexts of news media to refer to those who are following a story in real time.

For each of those words above, I had to look up a definition and I tried to carve my own so as to help me remember these words. I hope spaced repetition will not only aid in my understanding of reading new texts where the aforementioned words are used but also assist in my using the words in everyday conversation.

For those who are interested, the title for today contains the first six letters of a SHA hash, the contents of which are "Fun with Words April 8 2023". This will be useful if I decide to create a list page like my IndieWeb ^3 page that doesn't contain article descriptions. The text will help differentiate titles. Ruben Schade over at rubenerd.com has used this pattern but using UUIDs instead of SHA hashes in the past ^4. On reflection, Ruben's implementation feels more appropriate because UUIDs are unique whereas I had to add the date to the text whose hash I was generating to ensure the hashes would be unique between dates.

I used the following command on macOS to generate the SHA hash:

echo "Fun with Words April 8 2023" | shasum | cut -c1-6

Tagged in words.