What do Craig Boyko and David Eddings have in common? Okay, besides the fact they're both writers. Give up? Both Boyko and Eddings use one of my favourite words in a story. The word is defenestrate, and Eddings uses it in his novel The Hidden City. Boyko uses defenestration in his story "The Beloved Departed," published in the 18th edition of The Journey Prize Stories (selected by Steven Galloway, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Annabel Lyon). Even though it means something horrible (throwing someone out of a window, usually to their deaths), I still get a chuckle whenever I encounter that word (which isn't very often at all).

Although I believe it was first applied to the Defenestrations of Prague in 1419 and 1618, I've just encountered another meaning which I think could possibly give defenestrate a more positive spin: it could also mean "the act of completely removing Windows from a PC in favour of a different operating system." While cute, I'm afraid defenestrate, as a word, will still be doomed to relative obscurity.