zugunruhe

• The Germans call it "zugunruhe" - migratory restlessness - and it will impel each individual bird to head north once again, on the long and often dangerous journey back to our shores. —  Blogposts | guardian.co.uk
• ]David Smay sent me a link to a lovely long article in the Guardian about using unusual words: From albedo to zugunruhe, in which the author, James Meek, talks about words he hasn't known and his own uneasiness about using rarer (but more exact) words.It also has this great quote in it:The point at which a man starts finding discrepancies in dictionaries is probably the point at which he should go for a long holiday to a place that is sleazy and restoring.My take (and yes, I know it's self-serving, in that I make dictionaries) is that, in belletristic writing, when presented with an otherwise-equal choice between a fun, unusual word, and a boring, commonplace word, you should always choose the unusual one.

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