Ask a lawyer-lexicologist what his favorite word is and you'll get an answer as long as your average tort-reform proposal. Here it is.

I must confess that, having a rather "perverse" fondness for all of the entries—having "created" them in the sense of finding the word, setting up the entry and finding the example—I feel vaguely disloyal in favoring some over others. Having said that, I tend to like the entries that have a "backstory" either in terms of discussing the derivation of the word or its usage, since I felt like I was able to insert a little of myself into those entries.

Several examples that fall into the first category (derivation) are set forth below.

Several examples which fall into the second category (usage) are as follows:

While not focusing on the synonyms themselves, I also like the base words that offer many different synonyms, such as argument, conversation, criticize, desire, discussion, dull, evil, expression, fat, government, woman and so on. It is these kinds of entries that really separate this book from conventional thesauri.

In shorter answer to your question, I particularly like the word "misoneist" [miseonism: conservatism (as in hatred or fear of anything new or different) (person holding this view: misoneist)].