Dust and Spores

Hosted by Bermuda Onion, the point of this meme is to share all the new words you came across this week. Yay!

I said before that I've done like no reading lately, and I still haven't. So this week's not a mammoth Jest onslaught like last time. But still... from Infinite Jest:

trochaically -- consisting of a trochee, a trochee being a foot of two syllables, a long followed by a short in quantitative meter, or a stressed followed by an unstressed in accentual meter

By repeating this term over and over, perhaps in the same rhythm at which you squeeze a ball, you can reduce it to an empty series of phonemes, just formants and fricatives, trochaically stressed, signifying zip.

formication -- a medical term referring to the sensation of insects crawling on or under the skin

Did I experience some formication in detox? I did.

chiasmae -- the closest I can find is that this is related to chiasmus, a term in rhetoric referring to two or more clauses relating to one another through a reversal of structures, but it also refers generally to any "criss-cross structure"

...though the vitreally inflated balloon-eyes, deorbited and hung by twined blue cords from the second floo9r's optic chiasmae to flank the wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to...

And the next few are nicer words from Villette:

tisane -- herbal tea

Goton could do nothing for me but bring me a little tisane and a crust of bread...

provender -- dry food, as hay or oats, for livestock or other domestic animals; fodder

...his delight was to feed that ravenous sentiment, without thought of the price of provender, or care for the cost of keeping it sleek and high-pampered.