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Sometimes, being a writer is taking a 30-minute detour from writing to go on a wild goose chase after a word you're pretty sure maybe hopefully exists, and dragging in all the word-nerds in your family to help along the way, because the thesaurus has utterly failed you.
And all you can tell them about the identity of this missing word is, "it's somewhere between castigated and in the doghouse, and kind of a cousin to disgraced."
Because, of course, you only have the breath of a shadow of a ghost of whatever-this-word-might-be lurking in some back alleyway deep in your brain, and you can't even remember what letter it starts with. If it really does exist at all, which, after three of your fellow word-nerds fail to identify it, you're beginning to question.
We eventually found the word, by the way. After a few wrong turns past chastened, chastised, discredited, and besmirched, we came upon abased, and concluded it to be our elusive quarry.
The crowning absurdity in all of this? I just looked up disgraced again in the thesaurus. And there was abased, not quite halfway down the list. (My apologies to the thesaurus. It seems I need to read more carefully in future.) But at least we all got a nice, little linguistic evening stroll.