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Fossiliferous diction

Diction
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Word choice evoking paleontological strata, extinct species, or deep-time residues

Detailed Definition
Fossiliferous diction embeds archaic, obsolete, or etymologically ancient words—“linguistic fossils”—into contemporary verse to evoke historical depth, cultural layering, or semantic resonance; this technique connects present speech to linguistic ancestry, enriching texture through temporal juxtaposition.
Example
Example in poetry:
Fossiliferous diction appears in A.R. Ammons’ “Corsons Inlet,” naming geological strata; In Jorie Graham’s “Fast,” using paleontological terms for ecological elegy; In Tracy K. Smith’s “Watershed,” referencing extinct species; In Seamus Heaney’s “Bogland,” describing preserved bodies; Contemporary poet Craig Santos Perez uses fossil diction in “from unincorporated territory” to address colonial erasure.
Additional Notes
Language containing fossilized/archaic words like geological strata. Layers of historical diction. Related: archaism, historical linguistics. Study: when archaic diction enriches vs. obscures.
Also Known As
paleo-lexicon deep-time vocabulary
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