From Ataraxia to Zarelho

I’m in love with my newest acquisition, a sort of proto-thesaurus which I found at a sebo in Centro – a Dictionary of Synonyms in the Portuguese Language. The book is highly eccentric in a number of ways: first of all, it’s divided into I. VERBS and II. WORDS (NOT VERBS), apparently because Portuguese doesn’t have a way to distinguish between nouns and adjectives? (It definitely does, for the record.) Also, its cross-referencing is shot to hell (read: nonexistent); I was most looking forward to expanding my range of ways to express embriagado, drunk, but while the book must have dozens of synonyms for it they’re not gathered together in any one place. The picture I took includes one of them – encachaçado.

Brazilian reactions to the book have been mixed. I adore the words I’m picking up from it, but a good portion of them may be incomprehensible to anyone under the age of 60 or so. Case in point: a 24-year-old leafed through it and didn’t recognize half of the words on a given page, whereas a 78-year-old opened the book at random and practically cooed in delight. “Chibantear, that’s a good one.” My new favorite words:

Zebróide: imbecilic; stupid; silly. [also: zebroid. Your guess is as good as mine.]

Zopo – indolent; unsteady.

Ababelar – to confuse; to make disorganized; to mix.

Abadessar – to be or fulfill the functions of an abbot or abbess. What an amazingly useful word!

Estomagado – [literally, "stomached"] peeved; indignant; scandalized; resentful.

Zinzilular – chirp; twitter [in the archaic sense].

Laconizar – if “laconic” were a verb.

Czarismo – despotism.

Crocodilo – traitor.

I could go on forever like this, you guys. This is the best thing I’ve ever bought. I don’t care if nobody else uses these words, I’m going to start sprinkling them liberally in my conversation to the almost certain consternation of my Brazilian colleagues. Embrace your language, friends!