Uncredited Published Author
I'm now a published author in a publication that reaches thousands of readers. An uncredited published author, but published nevertheless.
A little piece that I wrote for the library's Infoblog called 10 Reasons to Have the Library Information Service On Your Speed Dial was picked up for inclusion in The Source, which is the library's monthly newsletter. When I found out they wanted to print it, I asked if I could rewrite it. Of course, time was scarce and I only spent a few minutes on the rewrite before I sent it in. I thought it was going to be buried somewhere in the middle in a little sidebar, but here it is in glorious large print right on the cover! This may be my biggest literary achievement to date, other than my appearance in the pages of Wired.
When trying to think of a difficult word for the "when a dictionary isn't handy" example, I flipped to a random page (via the random page feature on Amazon) of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I knew any single page of that novel would yield something unusual (in this case adamantine). It's hard for me to judge what kinds of words are unusual, since with my Scrabble training I think anestri and loriner and triazine are common words.
The Watergate salad example was inspired by my grandmother-in-law's bowl of holiday strangeness.
author!!