Attitude of Gratitude - Learning New Words

I am a self-proclaimed word nerd. I love playing Words with Friends, Scrabble and any other game with words at the center. I have been kindly mocked for looking up a word in the dictionary and getting distracted by other words that catch my eye. See? Word nerd.

I love learning new words. Most of them I'll probably not have occasion to use, but when I come across them in a book or other publication, I'll be glad to at least recognize them.

I was on Grammar Girl's site recently (looking to see if she had a post on "your" versus "you're" because improper usage seems to be running rampant all around me) and came across two new words.

• Neologisms: words that are made up or assigned a new meaning. The examples she gave were "blogosphere" and "McMansions." Be careful when you create or laugh at a neologism - that's one of the ways new words are added to the dictionary.
• Recondite: difficult to penetrate, incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge. I like this one quite a bit. It seems like a useful word to tuck away in my back pocket.

Neologisms can be viewed as recondite by the masses. 

Go forth and use a new word today!