an archive of words

(ˈsel-ˌküth), adjective | Rare, unusual, and wondrous, selcouth connotes an air of mystery and unfamiliar exquisiteness, which has been unexpectedly discovered. Strange, yet beautiful, selcouth should be reserved to describe the extraordinary.  (via wordsnquotes)

I’m in love. Fucking words, right?

I. luxuria.  the light has been coming in for an hour, a pale heat across your shoulders. his face is gentle but your skin remembers his cardinal mouth and his teeth. when he wakes, his fingers will murmur at your nape and down your soft-strung spine, and he’ll say, with the grin of the living, more?

II. gula.  there are parties with champagne that tastes as light as laughing; and too much bread and coffee on mornings after; sticky sugared slices of apple pie in a corner cafe; pad thai in hot brown paper, shared while your soul grows fat with love; and the clattering feasts of many brought under one roof: when the evening draws down and the night presses at our windows, we come, we sit, we eat.

III. invidia. the water on the window draws cuneiform glyphs, and you are making coffee and listening to her sing, low and sweet as rain. in a while he will come in, wet and rowdy, and touch her with hands you have failed to hate, and break the pane of this quiet thing—but not yet, not yet.

IV. acedia.  you sleep and sleep, and wake with grey head and bones. the day is lead and sickened, and there are shadows on the surface of things. you falter between the hours. it’s a haunt you’ve seen in other faces, before the bearer stows it away, and the words clutter on your tongue—you too?

V. avaritia.  —not yet enough of a sunset after rain and saffron-lit pavements, a hundred evening voices, warm hand tugging your hand, a violin played underground for coins, a train-car and the ghosts that faces wear, all the dark and patient streets to your house, a quarter-moon and silvering air, a scarf unwound red in a hallway, perfume faded on wrists, and your fingers in black hair. you don’t know if you’re hollow or heavy with longing. you have always been hungry. 

VI. ira.  after he hurts her, you take her to the hospital. you take her ten roads home. you bring her books and sweet-williams. you wait. on the sixth day she calls: not enough evidence. her voice is colourless. on the ninth day you see him in a courtyard—you are shouting, and startled to find his blood on your hand. when she asks you about it her mouth lifts, briefly.

finicky

painstaking

fastidious

particular

precise

scrupulous

conscientious

persnickety (it’s real word i promise)

accurate

meticulous

punctilious

exact

for example:  (note: this isn't to say that the words listed are traits that people with these mental illnesses have! these are options that mean the same thing as the popular but incorrect & offensive usage of these words!)

neurotic:

high-strung

obsessive

fixated

hysterical

psychotic: 

do not use this word or any of its synonyms in the thesaurus when you're describing a villain or a nasty or abusive person. instead of using the word "psychotic" as a cop-out to emphasize how nasty your villain is, how about trying some descriptors that don't stigmatize people will psychosis in the process?

also, never use "psycho" either—it has even more derogatory connotations!

ADD/ADHD:

frenzied

adrenalized

hyperactive

feverish

bipolar:

capricious

volatile

mercurial

erratic

godavari paints — [ url ]

shades of blue

shades of blue-green

shades of yellow-green

shades of yellow

shades of orange

shades of brown

shades of red

shades of pink

shades of purple

Benjamin Moore [ url ]

off-white

blue

green

yellow

orange

red

neutrals

2015 colour trends (.pdf booklet)

Behr [ url ]

room / style inspo (main page)

2015 colour trends (simple web page)

colour gallery

Dulux [ url ]

colour gallery

colour wheel / colour schemes

2014 colour trends (simple web page)

The wiki! [ url ]

compact list of colours

list of colours A-F

list of colours G-M

list of colours N-Z

list of fictional colours

crayola crayon colour names

shades of colours (main page)

shades of blue

shades of green

shades of yellow

shades of orange

shades of red

shades of WHITE - BLACK - GRAY - BROWN

Wiki’s COLOUR portal

ETC.

colorhexa - you can even type in the colour’s hexcode and it will give a lot of information on that colour! This site is great, and it even provides colour schemes and alternatives. Very handy.

design-seeds - a blog that has tons and tons of pretty palettes, generated from images. You can click on a colour, and it will give you other palettes containing that same colour!

colorcombos - crap ton of palettes and colours. You can input a website’s URL and it will spit back all of the colours used! Handy for making blog pages match the main theme!

colornames.facts.co - really strange site and terribly formatted/designed, but has hundreds of colour names. You can also choose a specific base colour and see all the variants of it (red, blue, etc.) I would use adblock when going to this site.

paletton - really, really neat palette generator. To me, it seems very intimidating because of all the options, but it’s very useful.

I’d like it if people could add to this list, but I wanted to point a few words out that we, as writers, should stop using OR try to avoid. I didn’t realize a few of them were offensive until I was older, but I think a lot of people don’t really know the true definitions of the words they’re using. Until you read something or you’re called out on it, you might never really know. Here’s a short list—

Spooks/spooky- Up until high school, I didn’t even think that this could be an offensive word. Since it’s used around Halloween time to describe ghosts and other creepy stuff, I never gave it a second thought. It wasn’t called out on it until I was a senior in high school, when I was writing a Halloween article for our school newspaper. The school administrator, who has to approve all our articles, told me to remove the word because it used to be a racial slur. I think I used something like “scares and spooks”, but it opened my eyes to the origin of the word.

Gyp/gypped- People use this term to describe being ripped off, but the term comes from “gypsy”. I think more people are becoming aware of how insensitive this term is because I haven’t heard it in a while. However, I’m sure it still creeps up in conversation and in novels, so avoid this term.

Exotic- Lots of writers use the word exotic to describe people of color, so the word has become super insensitive. Describing a character as exotic insinuates that you think they’re strange and different and that’s the only way you see them.  Calling someone you exotic is like saying “You’re different, but you can be beautiful too!” There are other (better!) ways to describe your characters.

Ghetto- Someone can live in a ghetto, but describing someone or something as “ghetto” should never be done. It’s a negative term that carries a lot of weight, so rethink your usage of it. Even when using it to describe locations, do your research. Understand what ghetto means and how it should be used.

This is why research is so important. It’s hard to figure out if something is offensive unless you know, so listen to what people are telling you. Don’t brush something off just because not enough people have complained or you disagree. Take the time to understand what they mean.