A Word I Love: Lain
It’s just so very pretty, isn’t it?
Etymologies available here and here.
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.
First Clown: . . . . Here's a skull now; this skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years.
Hamlet: Whose was it?
First Clown: A whoreson mad fellow's it was: whose do you think it was?
Hamlet: Nay, I know not.
First Clown: A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! a' poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.
Hamlet: This?
First Clown: E'en that.
Hamlet: Let me see. [Takes the skull.] Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. . . .
Shakespeare, Hamlet.
And listen to this, one of my favorite songs of all time (song starts at 0:17, I strongly encourage you to stop it by 3:23 as the music they use for the end credits totally kills the mood):
Two Words I Used Earnestly in a Five-Day Period
(1) Cad – I referred to someone as a cad.
(2) Swell – When a friend asked if I’d like him to share some information with me, I said it would be swell if he did.
Relatedly: About six months ago I referred to someone as a “dickweed.” Immediately after it came out of my mouth I was shocked by it. That word was an often-used piece of my vocabulary when I was in my early teens, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say it in at least 17 years or so.
Words from Suttree
I just started reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. I’ve never read any of his stuff before, except for the first 10 pages or so of No Country for Old Men (I didn’t stop because I didn’t like it, I was just browsing the books on my mom’s bookcases). Never in my life have I had to look up so many words when reading something. There’s a saying about reading Infinite Jest: make sure you have two bookmarks and the O.E.D. handy. But, so far, on a words per page basis Suttree blows Infinite Jest out of the water on the words-Trent-doesn’t-know scale. So here’s a list of the Suttree words I looked up in getting through the first chapter (25 pages of text, but the dialog sections have way fewer words that I need to look up, so the words here are almost all from the 15 or so pages of non-dialog): [n.1]
Foetal – Variant of fetal/fetus
Alluvial – Detritus from running water
Hawser – Large rope for towing/securing/etc a ship
Interstitial – Relating to / situated in a gap
Striae – Stripe/line, groove, channel
Stele – The central vascular portion of the axis of a vascular plant, usually cylindrical
Pinchbeck – Fools gold, a counterfeit thing
Rictus – The gape of a bird’s mouth
Mucilage – Gelatinous substance of various plants
Reticulate – Resembling a net or network
Plover – Type of bird, like a sandpiper
Viscid – Sticky, having an adhesive quality
Volute – Spiral or scroll shaped; a type of mollusk
Gambrel – A stick or iron for suspending slaughtered animals
Incruent – Bloodless
Homunculus – A little man
Instanter – At once
Grapnel – Small anchor, usually with 4 or 5 flukes used especially to recover sunken objects
Stob – Stake, post
Flowage – An overflowing onto land
Rimpled – Wrinkled, crumpled
Agoggle – (Agog) Full of intense interest
Cerements – A shroud for the dead
Sulcate – Scarred with furrows, usually longitudinal
Terratoma – [s/b “teratoma”?] A type of tumor
Riven – To tear apart, rip open
Quadrate – Square, or nearly
Davited – (davit) a crane that projects over the side of a ship
Catenary – The curve of a cord that hangs between two fixed points
Cannelured – Ring like groove, the groove near the butt of a bullet
Breeks – Breeches, trousers
Parget – Any plaster or rough cast used to cover walls/etc
Gaitered – (gaiter) A covering for the ankle, calf, shoe top, compare to “upper”
Amphoric – Resembling the deep, hollow sound made by blowing across the mouth of a bottle
Note 1: The definitions are mostly my abbreviated versions I noted when I looked each word up. Also: A few of the words in the list are somewhat familiar to me (e.g., alluvial, interstitial, pinchbeck), and others are of the sort where I could’ve made a decent guess (e.g., viscid, instanter, riven), but I wasn’t sure so they made the list.
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