Les Jones

Word of the Day > Words of the Day - Zeitgeist and Eponymous

From the Dilbert Blog's Acting Smarter Than You Are:

It’s also good to know a few brainy words that only appear in high-end publications. The two words you need most are zeitgeist and eponymous. I try to drop one of those two intellectual turds into conversations as often as possible. If you use those words with confidence, people will naturally assume you know lots of other big words.

eponymous - The dictionary definitions I found didn't make any sense, so I won't link them. Eponymous means that the name is the same. The name of Led Zeppelin's first album is Led Zeppelin. REM had an album called "Eponymous" but since it wasn't called "REM" it wasn't really eponymous. That's Michael Stipe's idea of a joke, anyway.

zeitgeist - "the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time," says Dicionary.com, and that's a decent definition.Pronounced with two long i sounds. It's a German word, and typically when you see e and i together in German you pronounce whichever comes second. And there's Google Zeitgeist that keeps track of topical searches.

There you go. You are officially smart. You may now pick up your ThD (Doctorate of Thinkology).

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