Words of the Present

1. adoxography -- skilled writing about an unimportant subject; good writing about trivial subjects
2. agelast -- person who never laughs
3. ailuromania -- excessive fondness for cats
4. anaxiphilia -- act of falling in love with the wrong person
5. antinomy -- contradiction or opposition, especially between two laws or rules; contradiction between principles or conclusions that seem equally necessary and reasonable; paradox
6. autodidact -- self-taught person
7. belamour -- glance of love
8. bellitude -- beauty
9. bibliogony -- production and publication of books
10. bibliosopher -- one who gains wisdom from books
11. cingulomania -- strong desire to hold a person in your arms
12. clockless worker -- employee who is willing to work at any time, day or night
13. cognoscenti -- connoisseurs of art, literature or music; those with refined tastes
14. cupboard love -- show of affection motivated by selfishness
15. digitalia -- computer hardware and software and other organs of digital technology, taken as a whole
16. dinosaur wine -- writer Kinky Friedman's term for petroleum or oil
17. gynics -- knowledge of women
18. hoplophobia -- fear of guns
19. lagniappe -- word mainly used in southern Louisiana and Mississippi to mean either a small gift presented by a storeowner to a customer with the customer's purchase or else an extra or unexpected gift or benefit
20. lexiphanes -- person who uses ostentatious language
21. logophilia -- love of words
22. macrobian -- term which describes any organism which has a long life
23. macrologist -- boring conversationalist, usually met at parties
24. mouse potato -- person who spends a lot of time at the computer
25. mulierose -- addicted to the love of women
26. neologist -- person who coins new words
27. neophobia -- fear of anything new
28. noctuary -- record of what passes in the night; a nightly journal
29. petrichor -- pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell
30. philonoist -- seeker of knowledge
31. playback drift -- inability to play back data that has been saved on an obsolete storage medium due to modernization and technological advances.
32. plutography -- book (or, more generally, literary genre) that examines the lifestyles of rich and famous people.
33. preterist -- one who is fond of reliving the past
34. pronoia -- suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf; opposite of paranoia
35. sarcology -- study of the soft or fleshy parts of the body
36. Scholar's Mistress -- term used in Fritz Leiber's novel Our Lady of Darkness to refer to a random pile of books and magazines which forms a roughly human shape.
37. sensory miser -- one who begrudges a too-extravagant experience of life
38. sensualist -- someone concerned with gratifying his or her sexual appetite
39. sensuist -- someone who rejoices in sensory experience
40. sophophobia -- fear of learning
41. synesthesia -- stimulation of one sense stimulating another
42. tacenda -- things that should not be mentioned
43. tanquam -- something that only seems to exist
44. temporal provincial -- term used in Michael Crichton's novel Timeline to refer to a person who is both ignorant of the past and proud of his ignorance
45. thanatopsis -- contemplation of death
46. verbivore -- person who devours words
47. vespertine -- during the evening
48. vetanda -- forbidden things
49. videnda -- things that ought to be seen
50. voluptuary -- one whose life is given over to luxury and sensual pleasures and who habitually indulges in (an excess of) sexual activity; sensualist