Old Fashioned Words

I've been diligently plodding away on a new story set in the modern era when my mind took a detour to the past and as a result I've been contemplating old-fashioned words and phrases I wish I could use in everyday life without being thought odd. I think my favorite such words is-

Cad: an ill-bred man, especially one who behaves in a dishonorable or irresponsible way toward women.

Perhaps I simply move in the wrong circles but I've never had the opportunity to use it in day to day life. Does anyone else have words they wish they got to use more often?

nswitch/thereader0987

Actually I do use the word 'cad' sometimes, and occasionally 'bounder' but then again, I do rather enjoy using archaic language.
Callipygous is a word I wish I had the nerve to use more frequently.

Ok, I'm gonna save everyone else from having to do what I've just had to do.........and go look that word up!!

It means 'having beautifully proportioned buttocks'.

Great word, Ollie.

XxxxX

Sot – A habitual drunkard stupefied by drinking booze.
Cuss – To use a swear word
Dapper – To look pretty darn good
Smitten – One that might be in genuinely in love all of a sudden
Kiester – A slang term for the buttocks

Smitten is one of my favorite words... I use it all the time! Along with besotted.

I don't wish to be a curmudgeon, but this thread is getting far too frivolous.

I don't think sot, dapper or smitten are that outdated - maybe smitten because it was really slang, which dates fast. The literal meaning, of course, is "struck" - as in "Try to avoid being smitten with (or by) a battleaxe". Cuss in British English only appears in some dialects and we think of it as American - the sort of thing a cowboy says in a Western.

"Nice" once meant "precise" and was much more meaningful then.

I once heard this word and now I can't ever forget it.

Lickspittle : 1. A person who behaves obsequiously to those in power.

Comes of course from the Greeks, who as always had a word for it. They even worshipped the goddess Aphrodite in one of her aspects as Aphrodite Kallipygos - Aphrodite of the Beautiful Bottom. I like to think that priestesses at her shrine received spankings as part of their rites.

Callipygean (or callipygian) or callipygous are all proper, descriptive words for a specific thing and are entirely suitable for everyday use, especially if you want to confuse other people, which is always fun. In these days of political correctness and sexual harrassment "hostile workplace" complaints to Human Resources, it might be used in a camoflauge-y kind of way to refer to a female co-worker with none the wiser (a lot of people don't want to admit they don't know what a word means if one uses it in seemingly everyday conversation, especially if you use it discreetly or sparingly).

Of course, they could always Google it...