In my reading the past few days I came across two words that stayed in my head: Patois and sacerdotal.

The sound and feel of these words are fun, thrilling.

I’m ashamed that I had to look them up. I know that I used to know their meanings.

Do you know the definitions?

Sacerdotal: of or relating to priests or the priesthood; priestly.
Patois: a regional form of a language, esp. of French, differing from the standard, literary form of the language.

I like how they feel in my mouth, I like how they sound. I like the definitions, too.

I regularly mourn my apparently diminishing vocabulary. When I start feeling this way:
• I’m reminded to go play on Free Rice.
• It also should be motivation to read significant literature, which seems to stretch the reader’s vocabulary much more than insignificant, casual reading.
• I long for an academic environment and wonder if this is a nearly unavoidable symptom of being out of school.
• I wonder if part of it due to my recent years in newspapers, where it’s drilled into us to write at a 6th-grade level.

Do you ever feel this? What do you turn to as a solution, or at least as a stopgap?