Vocabulary -- Page 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): letters
• Middle Passage
• amanuensis (a - manya - wenses): a literary or artistic assistant, in particular one whotakes 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
• 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
• 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

Water:

• epeiric sea: inland sea; also epicontinental sea
  pelagic
  riparian