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.”
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
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