Another obscure word for the linguo-scrapbook: banausic, which is used at one point in the book Problems of Knowledge. It means mechanical, mundane, routine—and though it looks a bit like "banal" apparently it's unrelated to that; the root is ancient Greek from a word for manual laborers or artisans. According to the Wikipedia article "banausic" first appears in English in the 1800s. That same article comments "It has been conjectured that the Elizabethan use of "mechanical" (as in e.g. Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream) is a translation of banausos."

^z - 2010-08-02