A Skylight on Mount Olympus

Hypaethral (also spelled Hypethral)

         According to Merriam-Webster Online, hypaethral is defined as a place with nothing prohibiting the sky from sight. It is an adjective, which means that it describes a noun.

         Examples:
    
         The sunlight broiled the baseball players in the hypaethral stadium.

         I had no cover from the rain because my greenhouse was hypaethral.

        Interestingly enough, when I learned this word, I noticed something.

        I wrote earlier that where you put a word in your prose was important to the sentence because of the way it sounds. Hypaethral is no different. You would probably not use it on Twitter, Facebook, or in a text message because it sounds like it should be in a college paper. In the case of hypaethral, it does something else as well.

        When I say or read the word hypaethral, I immediately think of it as a word that should be in classic Greek mythology. I probably think that because the word Hyperion sounds similar in the first syllable. Did you notice that both hyperion and hypaethral kind of look similar as well?

        Granted, one can quickly tell the difference between these two, but when words look similar in any way, they have the potential to connect to each other in the mind of the reader. This idea is what poets call eye rhyme, which is when two words look like they should rhyme, but they don't.

        Examples:

        rough doesn't sound like bough
        
        laughter has a different ring than slaughter

         In no way does ballet sound like mallet

        The advantage of using eye rhyme with your word usage is that if a word looks like it would relate to another, a writer will not sound unusual using it in such a context. For example, I mentioned above how one wouldn't use hypaethral in a Facebook post, but wouldn't it look natural in a short story about Apollo or Zeus? A reader might expect such a word, since it looks like it would fit in a such a story.

        So when deciding on a word, see if it sounds right in the sentence, but do not neglect to see if it looks right in the sentence.