Vocabulary

Vocabulary One

The words:

• penultimate: second-to-last (not the last chapter; the second-to-last chapter, for example)
• reify (past tense: reified): make (something abstract) more concrete or real (Louisa Gilder, “Entanglement”, p. 15)
• salacious: treating sexual matters in an indecent way and typically conveying undue interest in or enjoyment of the subject (comes from Latin, “salt”; the Romans called a man in love, “salad"
• vitrine: glass-encased shelves; old piece of furniture;
• Kaiserschmarren: pancake-fruit dessert enjoyed in Austria; Bavaria; eastern Europe;
• Flummery: empty compliments; nonsense; “she hated the flummery of public relations
• balaclava: a ski mask; name taken from Crimean war
• empyrean: heavenly; deriving from or belonging to heaven
• mahout: a person who works with, rides, and tends an elephant; used by some authors to mean “one who guides someone through life”
• mondain: worldly, moves in fashionable society
• moue (moo): pout (noun, gesture) to show distaste, disgust; when you see something you don’t like, a pouting face;
• refulgent: shining brightly; “refulgent blue eyes"
• redolent: strongly reminiscent
• insipid: lacking taste; bland, weak, shallow works by artists
• sartorial: tailoring, clothes, style of dress
• recondite: little known; abstruse (difficult to understand); While recondite may be used to describe something difficult to understand, there is nothing recondite about the word's history. It dates to the early 1600s, when it was coined from the synonymous Latin word reconditus. Recondite is one of those underused but useful words that's always a boon to one's vocabulary, but take off the re- and you get something very obscure: condite is an obsolete verb meaning both "to pickle or preserve" and "to embalm." If we add the prefix in- to condite we get incondite, which means "badly put together," as in "incondite prose." All three words have Latin condere at their root; that verb is translated variously as "to put or bring together," "to put up, store," and "to conceal."
• abstruse: difficult to understand
• perdition: a state of eternal punishment; a sentence (punishment); suffering (went through great perdition; went through great suffering)
• odium: general or widespread hatred or disgust directed against someone as a result of their actions
• praxis: accepted practice or custom
• agnatic: patrilineal inheritance in which monarchs grandchildren not eligible for inheritance of title until monarch’s children are “exhausted” — unlike British “to the left"
• uxorial: wifely (as in “uxorial duties”)
• eidolon: Greek word — ghost, an image or idea; think eidetic — to capture mental images with unusual vividness or detail, such as “eidetic memory"
• epeiric sea: inland sea; also epicontinental sea
• polemic: strong verbal or written attack on something
• enconium speech/writing to praise someone
• epistolatory (as in epistolatory novel)
• Middle Passage
• amanuensis (a - manya - wenses)
•     a literary or artistic assistant, in particular one who             takes dictation or copies manuscripts
• jeremiads
• vituperation: bitter and abusive language, fault-finding,             invective, opprobrium
• equipoise: balance or counterbalancing; “placed the owner in equipoise between the worlds of commerce and nature.”
• sonorous: imposing language; lofty, grandiose, pretentious
• erudite
• enconium: a speech or piece of writing that highly praises someone
• unemulously:  emulous: motivated by a spirit of rivalry; filled with emulation; boys emulous of their fathers (desirous of equaling or excelling); unemulously used by Henry James; unlikely ever used by anyone else
• Ruritania: a fictional country as a placeholder, similar to placeholder names Alice and Bob
• espy on them: see them, look at them
• sibilant: a manner of articulation, ex. sip, zip, ship, chip, and the “si” in vision
• vitrify: to turn into glass; vitrine: glass cabinet case
• flaneur: walker; one who finds pleasure in simply walking
• demi-monde: “half-world”; people living on the fringes of society; questionable morality
• tocsin: alarm bell or signal
• pieds–à–terre: a temporary or second lodging
• concision: brevity, laconicism, terseness; art and practice of minimizing words used in conversation
• purlieu: area near or surrounding a place; used by Virginia Woolf
• banlieue: suburb of a large city
• gamine: p. 48 in the Coco Chanel book’; a girl with mischievous or boyish charm
• sartorial: relating to tailoring, clothes, or style of dress
• desideratum: something that is needed or wanted
• atelier: workshop or studio (French word)
• morganatic marriage: marriage between unequal social rank; prevents heirs and wife from inheriting title, privileges,
• trousseau: clothes, linen, bedding collected for a bride-to-be
• benighted: in a state of pitiful or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance, owing to a lack of opportunity; or, overtaken by darkness
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey
• pallid, p. 3
• languidly, p. 4
• dowager, p. 8
• truculent, p. 9
• proletariat, p. 11
• 

• 

• Aristototle
• recondite:
• pelagic: far out to sea, p. 70
• etiolated: having lost vigor; become feeble; as a plant becomes limp/feeble without light/water, p. 79
• This Side Of Paradise
• p. 269, verisimilitude: appearance of being true
• epeiric sea: inland sea; also epicontinental sea
• pelagic
• riparian

Vocabulary Two

The words:

• drench: bleak, miserable dismal, dreary (northern England, Scotland, northern Ireland)
• benevolent: good
• avarice: greed
• surname: family name
• horticulture: farming, raising crops, gardening
• profundity:
• profound
• didactic
• tautology: circular reasoning
• quintessential: role model
• diminutive: extremely small
• soft underbelly
• rustic: rural, country
• obsequious: obsessively obedient; servile
• bourgeois: middle-class; humdrum values
• surreal
• surrealistic
• prose
• courteous
• siphon
• sublime
• solace: peaceful
• gregarious: fond of company, living in flocks
• anachronistic
• avuncular
• misogynist
• misanthrope
• misandronist
• morose

Vocabulary Three

The words:
 

• Mutatis mutandis is a Medieval Latin phrase meaning "the necessary changes having been made" or "once the necessary changes have been made".
• termagant: a harsh-tempered or overbearing woman; an imaginary deity of violent and turbulent character, often appearing in morality plays
• kowtow: Mandarin (Chinese) dialect — literally means to “bow down”
• solipsistically: solipsism — the theory that only the self exists; solipsistically: with consideration only for one’s own interests
• jeunes dorée: young people who are dazzlingly rich, elegant; etc; the youthful part of fashionable society.
• magnanimous:
• chatelaine: British, a woman in charge of a large house; biography of the Mitford sisters; Mary Lowell, c. 2001
• indomitability = untameable; Afghan guerillas
• recondite: little known; abstruse; obscure, esoteric
• hoydenish: A high-spirited, boisterous, or saucy girl.
• abstemious: not self-indulgent, especially when eating and drinking; temperate; moderate; self-disciplined; self-restrained.
• nonvolant: not-flying; volant means flying; nonvolant mammals are generally considered to be the small rodents, shrews, etc.

Vocabulary Four

The words:

• limerence: a state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and have one’s feelings reciprocated.
• incunabula: early printed books, especially those before 1501; initially called “fifteen’s”, then changed to incunabula;
• rhapsodic: o wax rhapsodic, to gush; effusively rapturous or emotional expression
• caparison: an ornamental covering spread over a horse's saddle or harness. Used in a sentence: “I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky.” — page 72, Conant.
• susurrus: whispering, murmuring, or rustling as in “He tired of the susurrus of promises, flatter, cajoling …” “"the susurrus of the stream"
• noetic: relating to mental activity or intellect. “The noetic quality of a mystical experience….” Feynman: “A noetic Casanova…”
• pellucid: translucently clear; lucid in style; easily understood; “a pellucid presentation” but also the “mountains reflected in the pellucid waters”
• scabrous: rough and covered with, or as if with, scabs; indecent; salacious. “veered toward scabrous assessments…”
• parvenu:
• noun: parvenu; plural noun: parvenus; noun: parvenue; plural noun: parvenues; a person of obscure origin who has gained wealth, influence, or celebrity."the political inexperience of a parvenu"

• eschatology: the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.
• parsimonious: adjective: parsimonious; unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal.
• Selachians: cartilaginous fishes that include existing sharks and typically most related elasmobranchs (such as rays)
• philopatrous: loyal to the site of their birth;
• philopatry: the tendency of an animal to remain in or return to the area of its birth
• sinless: adjective for “pure white”: as used by Philip Hoare, c. 2010, p. 268
• narwhal: from the Old Norse, nor and healer, meaning “corpse whale”
• magpie imagination: in many phrases / metaphors, “magpie” is used: magpies are noted for collecting all kinds of things and bringing them back to their nest; so when you see “magpie” think of a collector of large number of things, or ideas, very eclectic, items not otherwise related to each other; I saw this phrase in Hoare, c. 2010, p. 173;



Vocabulary Five

The words:

• nainsook: a fine, soft-finished fabric, usually white, formerly used for undergarments; from Hindi, pleasing to the eye
• verisimilitude: the appearance of being true or real
• diaphanous: light, delicate, and translucent (especially of fabric)
• ineluctable: inescapable; unable to be resisted or avoided
• quotidian: ordinary, mundane; that which happens daily
• catafalque: a decorated wooden framework supporting the coffin of a distinguished person during a funeral or while lying in state
• epicaricacy: Schadenfreude.
• denonyms: identifiers for where folks are from, for example, Hoosiers from Ohio; Cornhuskers from Nebraska; Hawkeyes from Iowa; or Iowans from Iowa; New Yorkers, etc. Contrast with ethnonyms.
• benthic: benthic zone is the ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water, including oceans, lakes; includes the sediment surface and some sub-surface layers. Animals that live in this region are called benthos. An octopus is a bench.
• mendacity, mendacious: tendency to lie
• perspicacity: shrewdness; the quality of having a ready insight into things;
• perspicuous: lucid; easily seen; clearly expressed; easy understood;
• propinquity: in the vicinity; near; nearby;
• casuistry: a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending theoretical rules from a particular case; generally pejorative, arguments that destroy morality, efface the essential differences between right and wrong; oversubtle, intellectually dishonest, sophistical
• sophistry: a false argument; subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning
• conflate: combine into one; “the urban crisis conflates a number of different economic and social issues”; it is easy to “conflate three different theories if they use similar terminology even though the theories may be as different as black and white;
• lagniappe: bonus gift, like the baker’s dozen; the thirteenth donut;
• puisne judge: french; a lower court judge; homophone in English: “puny”
• Verismo: realism in the arts, especially late 19th-century Italian opera; a genre of opera (particularly Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo)
• Proscenium: part of a stage; imaginary line where drape falls separating main stage from the apron
•  
• Scansion: the action of scanning a line of verse to determine its rhythm; the rhythm of a line of verse (“triple scansion”)
• Caul: cape, covering; amniotic membrane enclosing a fetus; the momentum; historical: a woman’s close-fitting indoor headdress or hairnet
• Calenture: tropical fever or delirium suffered by sailors after long periods away from land, who imagine the seas to be green fields and desire to leap into them. [Norris: Dakota]

Vocabulary Six

The words:

• Velleity: a mere wish; unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it;
• cachinnation: to laugh loudly, embarrassingly loudly
• termagant: harsh-tempered or overbearing woman
• reeve: local official, chief magistrate of a town or district in Anglo-Saxon England; along with “shire” eventually “shire-reeve —> sheriff
• tephra: solid matter ejected during a volcanic eruption; from Greek, for ashes
• nonce: coined for or used on one occasion; adjective, as in “nonce constructions.”
• Peripatetic: traveling from place to place; staying in one place for short periods of time;
• empyrean: heaven; highest part of heaven; the place in the highest heaven; occupied by the element of fire (Aristotle); used as a name for the firmament and in Christian literature, the dwelling-place of God; the scientific words empyreuma and empyreumatic: the characteristic smell of the burning or charring of vegetable or animal matter; same Greek origin
• Maecenas: from Gaius Clinius Maecenas: friend/political advisor to Octavian / Augustus; important patron for the new generation of Augustan poets, including both Horace and Virgil; Maecenate (patronage); his name has become the eponym for ‘patron of arts”; Virgil introduced Horace to Maecenas; Maecenas has become a byword in many languages for a well-connected and wealthy patron; In The Great Gatsby, along with Midas and J. P. Morgan, Maecenas is one of the three famous wealthy men whose secrets narrator Nick Carraway hopes to find in the books he buys for his home library.
• Bagatelle: light, inconsequential;
• Pelisse: cloak; originally military, then a woman’s cloak;
• Landau: carriage; four-wheeled; luxury; preferred by wealthy; great visibility for the occupants;
•  Enfilade rooms: rooms aligned with each other, as in museums;
• Orotund: pompous; pretentious.
• Ormolu: imitation gold; on furniture;
• Gamine: slim, elegant young woman, perceived to be mischievous, teasing, or sexually appealing (Audrey Hepburn, in “Love in the Afternoon.”).

Vocabulary Seven

The words:

Col: the lowest point on a mountain ridge between two peaks;

Prelapsarian: characteristic of the time before the Fall of Man; innocent and unspoiled; y

Recherché: adjective — exotic or obscure; “a few linguistic terms are perhaps a bit recherché for the average reader.”

Purblind: having impaired or defective vision;

Debouch: verb ; emerge, from a narrow or confined space, to a wide, open area “The stream finally debouches into a silent poo.”

Apotheosis: the highest point in the development of something; culmination; climax;;

Entrepôt: a port, city or other center in which goos are brought for import/export; for collection/distribution;

Louche: disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way;

Mondegreen: a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song; mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.

Adumbrate: verb (used with object), ad·um·brat·ed, ad·um·brat·ing. to produce a faint image or resemblance of; to outline or sketch. to foreshadow; prefigure. to darken or conceal partially; overshadow.

torpidity: inactivity due to lethargy, lack of energy; torpor; listlessness;

vicissitudes: a change of circumstances or fortunes, typically one that is unwelcome or unpleasant; alternation between opposite or contrasting things (“the vicissitude of the seasons”)

mendicant: given to begging; “this great mendicant order (Dominicans);

Escheated

Simony

Vocabulary Eight

The words:

• Anagnorisis: a moment in a plot or story, specifically a tragedy, wherein the main character either recognizes or identifies his/her true nature, recognizes the other character's true identity, discovers the true nature of his situation, or that of the others – leading to the resolution of the story.
• Peripeteia is the reversal from one state of affairs to its opposite. Some element in the plot effects a reversal, so that the hero who thought he was in good shape suddenly finds that all is lost, or vice versa.
• Anagnorisis is a change from ignorance to knowledge.
• A magpie culture: magpies (birds) are known to collect shiny, bright objects;
• Pelasgic: a member of any of the pre-Hellenic peoples (the Pelasgi) who inhabited Greece and the islands and coasts of the Aegean Sea before the arrival of the Bronze Age Greeks. Compare with “pelagic.” Related or simply coincidence? I don’t know.
• Quotidian : daily (activity); suggests mundane.
• Pusillanimous: timid
• Tarpaulin: heavy-duty, water-proof cloth
• Adroit: clever or skillful in using hands or mind;
• Liminality: noted in article on Hamlet, Orestreia;

Paronomasia: play on words.
• Antithesis: paired opposites.
• Stichomythia: line-by-line dialogue between two characters.
• Onomatopoeia: words that sound like their meanings

Vocabulary Nine

The words:

• Flaneurial, page 49.
• Fauborgs, page 58.
• Japonisme, page 63.