The University of Pennsylvania “Language Log” blog [see last post] has a glorious wealth of information and is the reason for the words and links below.
First: the complete text of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage is available on Google Books.
And now: vocab (!)
declension — the occurrence of inflection in nouns, pronouns and adjectives, indicating number, case, and gender (in English think: he/ his/ him); the Language Log post discusses how (foreign) proper names decline in Russian
deixis — the orientational features of human languages to have reference to points in time, space (so deictic words would be, e.g. “here,” “then,” etc.); the Language Log contributor’s dilemma: how to say “I’m happy to be here in Taiwan/ People’s Republic of China/ Chinese Taipei/ Republic of China/ the land formally known as Formosa” without offending someone or making it way too complicated…
epenthesis — the addition of one or more sounds to a word (specifically: excrescence for a consonant, and anaptyxis for a vowel); the Language Log example is the NYT’s excrescent “t” in Obama-tizing
epicene — loss of gender distinction; Language Log question: Is “their”/ “they” okay as the non-gendered third-person singular pronoun? (apparently, yes, and it has been in some circles for a long time; however, style for every editing job I’ve had has still been some version of “he,” “she,” “he or she,” “he/she,” “(s)he,” etc.)
phonotactics — a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes (i.e. sounds); examples in comments on Language Log here (re: Mandarin) and here (re: English)