OK, I acquiesce; now I'm off to convalesce

You just know when you dash off some half-baked musings on this sort of subject that someone will get all pedantic on your ass. I was only trying to shoehorn in a joke about wanking, for goodness sake.

Anyway. I've had mail drawing my attention to some other words of the -esce/-escent variety. They were sent to me as a list of -esce words, but as the general consensus seems to be that these are back-formations I'll list them in their -escent form. Here they are:

• acquiescent
• calescent
• convalescent
• deliquescent
• detumescent
• effervescent
• efflorescent
• evanescent
• incandescent
• intumescent
• juvenescent
• phosphorescent
• quiescent
• recalescent
• recrudescent
• rejuvenescent
• tumescent

Dictionary.com has -esce verb forms for all of them except calescent, detumescent, juvenescent, recalescent and rejuvenescent. Frankly I'm not entirely convinced by some of them, but there you are.

I should have known evanescent because of slightly ropey crypto-religious goth-rock one-hit-wonders Evanescence, and I should have known acquiescent because a) it's quite a common word and b) because of the (early - circa 1995 - and quite good) Oasis song Acquiesce.