Crepitate: to make a crackling noise. To make a series of short sharp noises.
I couldn't let that one go given my latest obsession with poetry. Only this morning I was reading about the need writers must have of being mindful of all 6 senses (something to do with kinetics connected to movement made up the surprising 6th). Onomatopoeic words like 'crackling' are fine - but dangerously close to cliche territory in some forms of use, so a crepitating fire may very well be a useful form of original sounding description if its use is relevant. And of course all poems have to be completely original or they aren't poems worth anything. Perhaps poems without originality (particularly if in free verse) are not even poems but only prose, chopped and delivered in a pseudo poetic style. A few more have cropped up. There's always a few more.
Deracinate: to uproot; to remove or separate from a native environment or culture; especially : to remove the racial or ethnic characteristics or influences from an area,
A good word - not very poetic perhaps, but worth adding to the Dream Lexicon, even if I did already know it before it became a Merriam Webster Word of the Day. I can see it being used in a poem - in one of those 'one long words that look interestingly difficult snuggling inside a poem and suggesting therefore that the poem has been written by someone who knows his or her subject' kind of ways.
Dottle: A small rounded lump or mass; especially, the tobacco remaining in the bottom of a pipe after smoking, which is often put on the top of fresh tobacco when refilling.
n. A plug or tap of a vessel.
This could be a good example of a word that has a specific use but can easily be borrowed to be used figuratively and usefully when writing poetry when (as one should always be I suppose), the poet is straining to avoid the damnable cliche. Although the word seems to describe tobacco - it could easily be used for a descriptive term for residue that plugs something up. The heart maybe - in romantic writings, or a 'drain' when not.
Chirk: cheer (usually followed by 'up' ). Or to make a shrill chirping noise.
Another little gem. To some people 'chirk' is a non word, and that will always be the danger when you spend so much time looking for originality. Originality of thought, word, expression etc forever trying to avoid cliche of any kind. Like crepitate, it's another 'sound' word. And encouraged by the 'How To' poetry writing site I'm using as a temporary guide, it ticks the sound component of the six senses: 'kinesiology' (motion) as I said being that strange sixth one that adds to the usual suspects of sight, sound, taste touch, smell.
Nivosity: Snowiness. A resemblance to snow. Probably not for poetry. In any case you can see how it would be condemned as an abstract. And abstract terms are anathema to the poet. Abstractions basically stand sterile and presume to do the imaginative work the writer ought to be doing himself rather than becoming over reliant on empty utility words. 'She felt happy' for example should not be preferred over: 'She smiled luminously whilst skipping from the room singing.' Even if that is a clumsy way of 'showing' happiness it's at least showing what's going on rather than telling and therefore avoids the abominated use of abstraction.
A metaphor: is a statement that pretends one thing is really something else. Obvious, you might say. Except that it isn't quite so when you're trying to remember the difference between it and a simile. 'As guitarists go, he's more engine stoker than driver. A soot-stained grafter who pours fuel on the song's furnace and without whose industry the fragile artists who strum ethereally above him would seize up and die.' That might need a bit of judicious pruning if not a complete rethink - but it might help me to stop getting mixed up between metaphor and a simile where the guitarist is more likely to be playing - I don't know - like a man with a pistol pointed at his head and a one way ticket out of town.
