CHAOGENOUS

adjective : arising out of chaos

“… chaogenous dreams of revenge were fuming in his serpent brain…” - Gardner, Jason and Medeia,  p. 222.

The first image of my Dead Words series, where I illustrate outdated, underused or extinct words I have found through devious means including the 1988 edition of “The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Words” compiled by the fantastically named George Stone Saussy III. There are some wild ones to come, as well as some I’m not sure would be safe for print. Some truly outrageous, others exceptionally ludicrous but all rather entertaining and tantalising.

I genuinely love Chaogenous as a word. I believe it has a rightful place in the lexicon, especially in our mad old world today and it rolls off the tongue something rotten! Of the words within the book, some stand up outright as exceptional and filthy, whereas others are made all the more interesting and hilarious by way of their intense and wholly original use in context by the writers using them (used by the likes of Nabokov and Beckett).