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!

SNOW DAY! I don't have to work! I know I shouldn't rejoice when houses of knowledge are shut down, but I've had a lovely, lazy day so far, and people can get their learn on tomorrow. Anyway...

To begin, from Story of O by Pauline Réage:

gynaeceum -- in ancient Greek and Roman houses, the section of rooms set apart for women

Jacqueline was her professional name, a name chosen to forget her real name, and with it this sordid but tender gynaeceum, and to se herself up in the French sun, in a solid world where there are men who do marry you and not disappear...

This refers to how the character grew up in a small apartment with her mother, aunt, and grandmother. It's not a brothel or anything, though I suppose the term could still apply.

The next one is from Philip Roth's short novella, The Breast.

adipose tissue -- basically, fat tissue

...I experienced myself as speaking to others like one buried within, and very nearly strangulated by, his own adipose tissue...

Fun fact from Wikipedia: "Adipose tissue is derived from lipoblasts!" Exclamation mine.

Ok and to finish up, these are from The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett.

valetudinarian -- a weak or sickly person, especially one morbidly concerned with his or her health

Its communication with the Baths,is through the yard of an inn, where the poor trembling valetudinarian is carried in a chair, betwixt the heels of a double row of horses...

That was neat... not all what I expected that word to mean.

encomium -- a Latin word deriving from the Classical Greek ἐγκώμιον (encomion) meaning the praise of a person or thing

In the course of coffeehouse conversation, I had often heard very extraordinary enconiums passed on the performances of Mr T--, a gentleman residing in this place, who paints landscapes for his amusement.

lububrations -- that which is composed by night; that which is produced by meditation in retirement; hence (loosely) any literary composition

[N]ay, they do not even scruple to arrogate themselves the merit of some of his performances, and have been known to sell their own lucubrations as the produce of his brain.

That's it! See ya next week!

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

Don't have much to say this week, so I'll just get right to it. These are from 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King.

bohunk -- a rude slang term for someone from Eastern Europe

... there was a faint accent in the words, although they were perfectly spoken. The guy might be a frog or maybe a bohunk.

Ok, so don't use that one.

pyx -- a container in which wafers for the Eucharist are kept

He held a small silver pyx on his lap which contained several pieces of the host.

repple depple -- military slang for a "replacement depot"

He had learned that standing guard at the repple depple in the war.

That one I still don't really get, but I doubt I'd have use for it even if I did. Actually, none of these are words I envision myself saying, y'know, because I'm not Catholic, manly, or racist.

These next few are from Story of O by Pauline Réage, which is pretty racy, but I already know all the words in those parts... (ahem)... so these words here are about fabric and clothing design.

percale -- a closely woven plain-weave fabric often used for bed linens

She tried to stop moaning and to immobilize herself against the wall, whose gleaming percale was cool on her tortured flesh, as day slowly began to break.

gusset -- triangular or square piece of fabric inserted into a seam to add breadth or reduce stress

The bodice was long and stiff, stoutly whale-boned as during the period when wasp waists were in style, with gussets to support the breasts.

(She really likes describing the clothes and decor.)

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

I just finished Lord Foul's Bane, the first book in the series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, and I really hated it. Nonetheless, these kinda neat words were in it, so I suppose all is not lost.

bonhomie -- good-natured, easy friendliness

The man had been Joan's lawyer at the divorce -- a short, fleshy individual full of the kind of bonhomie in which lawyers and ministers specialize.

preterite -- of, relating to, or being the verb tense that describes a past action or state

Beggars and fanatics, holy men, prophets of the apocalypse didn't belong on that street in that sunlight; the frowning, belittling eyes of the stone columns held no tolerance for such preterite exaltation.

(I dunno, this word still makes no sense to me here. I'm not sure what columns he's talking about either, or why they have eyes in the first place, much less belittling ones.)

chiaroscuro -- meaning "light-dark" in Italian, the use of contrast between light and dark in art

Covenant followed the red eyes upward, but he could see nothing there except the dizzy chiaroscuro of the cluttered stone spikes.

(This word's really cool, but he uses it about fifty times so that it stands out awkwardly and makes the book feel like an extended high school vocab assignment. He does the same with "incarnadine", which basically means red.)

atavism -- recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination; recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity

Gradually, he grew aware of other things -- the tree shade bedizened with glints of declining sunlight, the aroma of pine, the wind murmuring, the grass thickly cradling his body, the sound of a tune, the irregular tingling that came and went from his palms like an atavism -- but the warmth of his cheek on Lena's lap seemed more important.

(Uh, ok, in the book the man used to have no feeling in his hands. They were numb because of a medical condition. So the tingle wasn't "like" an atavism, it "was" an atavism. A lot of his comparisons are like that. To make up a simpler example: "The scary monster that ate her family approached her, and she screamed, as if both grieving and terrified." That's not from the book. It's not from anything. Nobody would say that. But do you see what I mean?)

anodyne -- anything that calms, comforts, or soothes disturbed feelings

The swelling night seemed full of soft communications -- anodynes for the loneliness of the dark.

(You'll be happy to know I have nothing to say about this one. I actually find the usage quite lovely.)

eyot -- variant of ait; an islet, especially in a river

Beyond him, in the bottom of the hollow, stood a single copse like an eyot in a broad glade.

(...)

abnegate -- to deny oneself

Prothall's abnegate eyes did not waver.

(Abnegate is a verb, not an adjective. But this character is something like a high priest/scholar, so I suppose he did make some sacrifices. Why we're being reminded of it in the context of where this line is from is beyond me.)

Anyway sorry for all the little interjections, but as you can tell, I am NOT enamored with this book. I didn't realize the problems I had with his writing would come out so much in these examples. Anyway, I plan to talk about it more later today so come on back if you like hearing people complain about things on the internet!

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

Ok I haven't slept in two nights so let's get this over with. I read two or three books in a row that provided no words whatsoever, so I was glad to start a book today that gave me three in the first 30 pages.

These are from Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima.

cenotaph -- a tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person or group of persons whose remains are elsewhere

It had been composed with an artist's eye for structure: it really made it seem as if the thousands of soldiers who were present were arranged deliberately, like figures in a painting, to focus the entire attention of the viewer on the tall cenotaph of unpainted wood in their midst.

pellucid -- two definitions here: reflecting light evenly from all surfaces ; easy to understand

And the drop of ink spread, dull and gray, clouding everything in his heart that had been pellucid only a moment ago.

I think both definitions apply, but one is more metaphor pellucidness.

tonsure -- the practice of some religious sects of cutting the hair from the scalp of clerics, devotees, or holy people as a symbol of their renunciation of worldly fashion

After her ritual tonsuring, she declined to accept one of the benefices reserved for imperial princesses, deciding instead to found a new temple, one whose nuns would devote themselves to study of the scriptures.

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

Hi. I'm back.

To start, these are from Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories, which I have finished and will review soon. Specifically, they're from a story called "Afterward" by Edith Wharton.

espalier -- a tree or shrub that is trained to grow in a flat plane against a wall, often in a symmetrical pattern

cote -- a small shed or shelter for sheep or birds

She went first to the kitchen garden, where the espaliered pear trees drew complicated patterns on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated roof of their cote.

The next are from The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox, review also forthcoming.

assiduity -- constant personal attention and often obsequious solicitude

As the Marquis's Indisposition increased, so did her Care and Assiduity: She would not allow any one to give him any thing but herself...

Yeah, they do the German "capitalize every Noun" thing in this Book and it gets sort of distracting. But I like it.

rodomontade -- pretentiously boastful or bragging

I can't but think, cried Sir Charles, laughing, how poor Dolly must be surprised at such a rhodomontade Speech!

Yeah, and they italicize proper names. Helpful. n.b. Rhodomontade is an alternate spelling.

And the last three are from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Review NOT forthcoming because I'm only 30 pages in and this one is big.

spavin -- enlargement of the hock of a horse by a bony growth (bony spavin) or fluid accumulation in the joint (bog spavin), usually caused by inflammation or injury, and often resulting in lameness

... the upshot of which was generally this, that his horse was either clapped, or spavined, or greazed; or he was twitter-boned, or broken-winded, or something, in short, or other had befallen him, which would let him carry no flesh...

To find out why this is an upshot, you can buy the book and read the impossibly-long sentence yourself.

rectitude -- moral uprightness; righteousness

But there is a fatality attends the actions of some men. Order them as they will, they pass thro' a certain medium, which so twists and refracts them from their true directions--that, with all the titles to praise which a rectitude of heart can give, the doers of them are nevertheless forced to live and die without it.

lambent -- effortlessly light or brilliant

Yorick's last breath was hanging upon his trembling lips ready to depart as he uttered this: yet still it was uttered with something of a Cervantick tone; and as he spoke it, Eugenius could perceive a stream of lambent fire lighted up for a moment in his eyes; faint picture of those flashes of his spirit, which (as Shakespeare said of his ancestor) were wont to set the table in a roar!

Lovely, yes?

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

HOT!

Ok as usual, we begin with Infinite Jest, which I am still inching my way through:

febrile -- marked or caused by fever

... she is not drunk Joelle now sees but has taken Ecstasy, Joelle can see, from the febrile flush and eyes jacked so wide you can make out brain-meat behind the balls' poles...

afflatus -- inspiration; the blow of a new idea

... just a desire to swallow every last drop of saliva she will ever manufacture and exit this vessel, have fifteen more minutes of Too Much Fun, eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages...

(I still don't get that one.)

apotropaic -- intended to ward off evil

I suddenly understand the gesundheit-impulse, the salt over the shoulder and apotropaic barn-signs.

synclinal -- sloping downward from opposite directions to meet in a common point or line

A large red meaty character with eyebrows at a demonic-looking synclinal angle and very small nubbly gray teeth.

And again, for the last time, from Villette:

emulous -- desiring to equal or surpass another; characterized by a spirit of rivalry

Above the poplars, the laurels, the cypresses, and the roses, looked up a moon so lovely and so halcyon, the heart trembled under her smile; a star shone subject beside her, with the unemulous ray of pure love.

(Isn't that sentence lovely?)

votary -- a person who is fervently devoted, as to a leader or ideal; a faithful follower

Seeing him draw nigh, burying his broad wheels in the oppressed soil -- I, the prostrate votary -- felt beforehand the annihilating craunch.

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

Yeah I didn't do it last week. Oops. It's good, though, because I didn't really find anything this week, so... ok from three different books.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace as usual:

scrofulous -- morally degenerate; corrupt

As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings. First there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded black-T-shirt-and-spiked-bracelet types who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts...

gonfalon -- a banner suspended from a crosspiece, especially as a standard in an ecclesiastical procession or as the ensign of a medieval Italian republic

On Skull's back a half-m.-crag with THE DEAD in maroon on a vertical gonfalonish banner unfurling below...

frustum -- the portion of a solid — normally a cone or pyramid — which lies between two parallel planes cutting it

Hal puts one foot up on Pemulis's little frustum-shaped bedside stool and leans farther in.

glabrous -- smooth; having a surface without hairs or projections

...and for much of the glabrous part of his childhood Hal'd been classified as somewhere between 'Borderline Gifted' and 'Gifted'...

tumescence -- readiness for sexual activity marked especially by vascular congestion of the sex organs

...an erotically circumscribed G. W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer or something...

scopophobic -- fearful of being looked at or seen

asperity -- rigor; severity

Unwittingly all but authoring the Union designed to afford the scopophobic empathic fellowship and the genesis of sturdy inner resources through shame-free and unconstrained concealment, W. Churchill -- when the lady, no person's doormat, informed him with prim asperity that he appeared to be woefully inebriated -- made the anecdotally famous reply that while, yes, yea verily, he was indeed inebriated, he would the following A.M. be once again sober, while she, dear lady, would tomorrow still be hideously and improbably deformed.

Ok the next four are from Villette by Charlotte Brontë.

hebdomadal -- weekly

The classes were undergoing sweeping and purification by candlelight, according to hebdomadal custom...

phthisis -- any disease causing a wasting away of part or all of the body, especially tuberculosis; consumption

catarrh -- inflammation of a mucous membrane, esp. of the respiratory tract, accompanied by excessive secretions

...that dungeon under the leads, smelling of damp and mould, rank with phthisis and catarrh: a place you never ought to enter...

oppugnant -- opposing; antagonistic; contrary

He was much taken up with scientific interests; keen, intent, and somewhat oppugnant in what concerned his favourite pursuits...

And the last from Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay:

remora -- a suckerfish!

He was out there, feeding his Dark Passenger, and it was talking to mine. And in my sleep I had been riding with him, a phantom remora in his great slow circles.

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.

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

As previously stated, I'm reading Infinite Jest with a group of people online, and anyone who knows anything about David Foster Wallace knows that he was a wordie. That plus the fact that I started late and have had to read a huge chunk of this book to get caught up means this is going to be a long long loooooooooooong WWW. They will probably all be long through the end of the summer even though I'm skipping most of the medical terms of art peppered throughout the novel. Ready? Ok!

wen -- a benign encysted tumor of the skin, esp. on the scalp, containing sebaceous matter; a sebaceous cyst

I am debating whether to risk scratching the right side of my jaw, there there is a wen.

actuate -- to move to action

And in this new smaller company, the Director of Composition seems abruptly to have actuated, emerged as both the Alpha of the pack here and way more effeminate than he'd seemed at first...

presbyopic -- unable to focus clearly on nearby objects ; farsighted

O. stood there, he says, hefting a cold clod, playing with the Velcro on his puffy coat, watching as the Moms, bent way down to me, hand reaching, her lowering face with its presbyopic squint, suddenly stopped, frozen beginning to I.D. what it was I held out...

enfilade -- a military term referring to a sweeping fire from along the length of a line of troops

Uncle Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade of same, trying to mollify men who seem way more in need of a good brow-mopping than I.

magiscule -- cf. majuscule: a large letter, either capital or uncial, used in writing or printing

...and also an obscenity he had assumed was directed at him magisculed in red grease pencil along the bottom, with multiple exclamation points

maxillofacial -- of, pertaining to, or affecting the jaws and face

The medical attaché's particular experitse is the maxillofacial consequences of imbalances in intestinal flora.

fantod -- plural: a state of irritability and tension

Roaches give him the howling fantods.

dipsomania -- an insatiable craving for alcoholic beverages

...the father, a dipsomaniacal tragedian progressively crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite...

mordant -- bitingly painful

feck -- efficacy; force; value

...and devoted his unimpaired hours almost exclusively to the production of documentaries... and mordantly obscure and obsessive dramatic cartridges. leaving behind a substantial... number of completed films and cartridges, some of which have earned a small academic following for their technical feck and for a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time.

plangent -- loud and resounding; expressing or suggesting sadness; plaintive

...sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

leptosome -- a person with a slender, thin, or frail body

It's possibly odd that the leptosomatic Mario I., so damaged he can't even grip a stick, much less flail at a moving ball with one, is the one kid at [Enfield Tennis Academy] whose company Schtitt seeks out...

prandial -- of or relating to a meal

calliopsis -- a North American annual plant (Coreopsis tinctoria) widely cultivated for its showy flower heads with yellow rays and purple-red to brownish centers

quincunx -- an arrangement of five objects with one at each corner of a rectangle or square and one at the center

But often on a warm evening sometimes Mario and Coach Schtitt will find themselves out alone... Schtitt savoring a post-prandial pipe, Mario enjoying the smells of the calliopsis alongside the grounds' quincunx paths...

prolix -- tediously prolonged

...locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern.

pedalferrous -- the adjective form of 'pedalfer', which is a soil rich in alumina and iron, with few or no carbonates

fulvous -- of a dull, brownish yellow

They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine.

teratogenic -- of, relating to, or causing malformations of an embryo or a fetus

... fans atop the hugely convex protective walls of anodized Lucite hold off the drooling and piss-colored bank of teratogenic Concavity clouds and move the bank well back, north, away, jaggedly, over your protected head.

atavistic -- reverting to or suggesting the characteristics of a remote ancestor or primitive type

Besides Hal, who's atavistically dark-complected anyway, the ones here with the least bad piebald coloring are the players who can tolerate spraying themselves down with Lemon Pledge before outdoor play.

semion -- the Greek word for sign

One semion that still works fine is holding your fist up and cranking at it with the other hand so the finger you're giving somebody goes up like a drawbridge.

sangfroid -- coolness and composure, especially in trying circumstances

Maranthe's tone now become derisive despite his legendary sangfroid in matters of technical interviews...

guilloche -- a repetitive architectural pattern widely used in classical Greece and Rome, consisting of two ribbons that wind around a series of regular central points

He exhales a slow breath through rounded lips, looking off up a the ceiling's guilloche border

aperçu -- a brief or detached view; conspectus; sketch

He's thinking in an abstract absent way about limits and rituals, listening to Blott give Beak his aperçu.

osseous -- having to do with the bone, consisting of bone, or resembling bone

The U.S.S. Millicent's hair, which was almost osseously hard-looking, composed of dense woven nests of reticulate fibers like a dry loofa sponge...

boscage -- a mass of trees or shrubs; a thicket

There was no sign of Husky VI of any other model of tripod in any of the thickets and boscages.

murated -- ok I can't find a good definition of this word. It seems like it only occurs in this book and some genetics journals. One guys says it means "walled". Another says it has to do with genetic mutation. The first sounds spurious to me because it's a little "too easy" given the sentence it appears in:

Several times also Maranthe called U.S.A. to Steeply 'Your walled nation' or 'Your murated nation.'

agnate -- coming from a common source; akin

... then every third month Pemulis and Axford work the agnate unsupervised line that snakes across the blue lobby shag, selling little Visine bottles of urine out of an antique vendor's tub for ballpark wieners.

erumpent -- bursting through or as if through a surface or covering

He's never looked better on court or on monthly O.N.A.N.T.A. paper. He is erumpent.

éclat -- brilliant success

Hal's head, closely monitored by deLint and Staff, is judged still level and focused and unswollen/-bludgeoned by the sudden éclat and rise in general expectations.

rutilant -- having a reddish glow

... you're a machine a body and object, Jim, no less than this rutilant Montclair...

That's it! Oy.

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

From Piercing by Ryu Murakami:

potage -- a thick, often creamy, soup

I'm thinking I'll use a package of cream consommé. Knorr makes a good one, but on a cold night like this, when you feel chilled to the bone, potage is better than consommé, don't you think?

And from 1001 Nights of Snowfall:

suzerain -- a nation that controls another nation in international affairs but allows it domestic sovereignty

satrapy -- the territory or sphere under the rule of a satrap... a satrap being the governor of a province in ancient Persia

Now Snow was a proper woman of demure manners and bridled inwardly at such public declarations from a stranger, even one whose suzerain encompassed thrice three times three dozen kingdoms, city states, and satrapies.

Also, I've been reading some of the original X-Men comic books... I dunno why. Yes I do, they're awful and corny and I love them, that's why. Anyway, From X-Men #17:

mellifluous -- having a smooth, rich flow

perspicacious -- having keen mental perception and understanding

Marvel Girl: Honestly, Hank! Can't you ever speak like any ordinary, normal human being?
Beast: I do, Jeanie! It's just that I employ mellifluous adjectives to do it!
Marvel Girl: Oh, you're just impossible!
Beast: Very perspicacious of you, wench! And therein lies my charm!

Haha, wench! Why are half the quotes I use in this blog so misogynist? In the next panel he says "Prattle away then, female!"

Silly Beast.

This is the only other meme I'll do, I promise. Hosted by Bermuda Onion, the point is to share all the new words you came across this week. I do this anyway in a little notebook, so why not share, y'know?

This week I'm determined to finally finish Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, so it's 18-century words here... probably some that deserve resurrection.

spleen -- melancholy ; from another footnote, "'The fever on the spirits'... is a psychosomatic disorder, also called hysterics, the vapours, and the spleen. Doctors were especially fond of diagnosing their female patients with this condition."

Jones began to entertain strong hopes that his Sophia was present; and these hopes gave him more spirits than the lights, the music, and the company, though these are pretty strong antidotes against the spleen.

quinsy -- inflammation of the throat

caudle -- a warm drink of spiced gruel and wine or ale, for women in childbed

And I'm also reading The Golem's Eye by Jonathan Stroud, which managed to stir up three words on one page:

denuded -- without the natural or usual covering ; bald

antimacassar -- a cloth put over the back of a chair to prevent it getting dirty

Everything was much as she remembered: the frayed carpet, denuded of color; the little mirror over the mantelpiece; the elderly sofa and chair that her father had inherited from his father, complete with lacy antimacassars on the headrests.

acquisitive -- characterized by a strong desire to gain and possess

It was a gleeful, acquisitive smile, struggling hard to be contained.