Words I Should Know But Obviously Don’t

I’ve been doing a lot of reading of scientific journal articles at work and have come across words that I didn’t necessarily know… but apparently was supposed to. So, being a good criminologist, I looked them up. Not that I was utterly confused all day. I mean… I got the gist of the articles. Really.

Occult – Difficult to see, not visible to the naked eye, and only detectable by microscope or chemical testing.

Not as in supernatural, which was the only definition I knew previously.

Titer – Biochemistry: the concentration of an antibody determined by how much it is diluted before it no longer reacts positively to an antigen.

I figured this out due to context clues. But still… you’d think I’d have come across this word previously in my formal education.

Ungulate – Having hooves.

Okay, I knew this. I just couldn’t come up with what it meant at the time. There was a whole list of things – primates, marsupials, reptiles, birds… etc. I couldn’t decide if it was animals with hooves or mammals that lay eggs. --By the by, the egg laying ones are called monotremes.

And as an interesting side note, monotremes isn’t a word in Microsoft Word’s little spellchecker thingie, but it is in the built-in dictionary. Don’t you think those two things should somehow be linked? I do. How can it be spelled right and in the dictionary but not in the spellchecker? I always assumed they were one in the same. Apparently this is not true. I feel cheated.

And the red squiggly line is mocking my properly spelled word. Jerk.

Okay. Lesson for the day over.

End Blog.