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)