I delight in words, as you obviously must know if you've read with any depth the spill of language that is this blog. And so I've acquired the sporadic habit of snatching from some convolution of my grey matter a fanciful example of my vocabulary, musing upon it from a number of angles, and then lofting it into place as a post title to inspire me to write.
It's worked decently enough, a number of times. I'm particularly happy with "Atavism," a few entries past.
But oh, tonight, how I have stained the clean page of my anticipation with embarrassment.
A word, I thought. A word, a word, a word. But which?
And there bubbled into my sensorium this: causistry.
And I typed it. And the stinging red lash of the automated spell-checker denied me. What? Can this be? But ...
A right-click confirmed it. The word is casuistry. I have held it in my brain with the amorphous hints of a definition attached for years upon years, but all this time, I have mentally mis-spelled it.
Why am I so humiliated by this failure, yet shameless to admit I didn't have more than a vaporous phantasm of its meaning? Honestly, I can't quite say.
And given the output of my Google search to grasp its full and formal denotative identity, I plainly cannot stoop to rationalizing these emotions.
Thus, my new title above.