Word Roundup

Here’s a corral of words I gathered in my travels the latter half of this year.

Continuing from previous word alert entries, here are some words from the remainder of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groans:

• plaice: a type of fish.
• escutcheon: a nameplate or surface bearing symbols of heraldry.
• querail: quarrelsome? A Peake-ism.
• gelid: cold.
• gateau: cake.
• glacid: from context, describing a deep clear sky — glassy (or maybe glacé) + placid? Another Peake-ism, I think.
• palliasse: straw mattress or similar bedding.
• benison: benediction or blessing.

I set the rest of Gormenghast aside to sample bite by bite at a later date.

From Gideon the Ninth, book one of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series:

• uncanorous: unpleasant to the ear; not canorous.
• parclose: a screen or railing that separates part of a church or tomb from a more public area. (This definition lead me to read about hagioscopes and anchorites — yeesh.)
• complaisant: obliging and compliant; eager to serve (to be complacent is similar but perhaps more passive).
• catarrh: a phlegmy inflammation of mucous membranes.
• folderol: nonsense!
• cavil: to raise frivolous objections. To cite a lot of folderol.
• deliquesce: to dissolve, perhaps specifically in a slimy fungal sort of way.
• lahar: volcanic mudslide.
• tergiversation: wishy-washiness; evasive flip-flopping. (I think this one came from book two, Harrow the Ninth.)

From The Knight, book one of Gene Wolfe’s Wizard Knight duology:

• purling: gold embroidery or the swirling motion and babbling sound of a brook.
• chary: wary and prudent.
• raddle: a rod woven into the structure of a fence, or something so woven.
• merlon: the raised parts of a battlement; the gaps between them are crenels. Used as an adjective: merloned.

There were more (it was Wolfe, after all), but I think I took a break from noting new words around the time I read this book.

From other books I’ve read in recent months:

• yclept (from Nick Mamatas’ fandom pastiche I Am Providence): named or called.
• agnate (from an Ann Leckie story auxiliary to Ancillary Justice): paternal lineage; in-universe, a matriarchal clan.
• cynosure (from the forthcoming Book of Flaco): a focal attraction, or a guide to such a point of attraction.
• abseil (from Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time): to rappel up or down a rope (or spiderweb).
• condottiere (from the illustrated owl book The Nightwatchers by Angus Cameron and Peter Parnnall): a mercenary.
• cyma (also from The Nightwatchers): the “S” shape where a convex and concave curve meet. Bonus term: ogee, a pointed arch formed from a pair of cyma curves.
• refulgent (from Return of the Osprey by David Gessner): radiant.
• quincunx (from The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson): an arrangement of five points, as on the five-pipped face of a die.
• irenic (from The Future of Life by E. O. Wilson): conducive to peace or reconciliation.
• pettifogging (from Encounter with the Archdruid by John McPhee): quibbling or posing petty objections.
• plebiscite (from Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh) a referendum or vote among the whole electorate.

From other media, articles, and unrecorded sources:

• suzerainty (from the comic adaptation of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser illustrated by Mike Mignola): the domain of a feudal lord.
• sinecure (from Gary K Wolf’s review 0f a Sofia Samatar book): a cushy job or office with little responsibility.
• welter (from a game of Words with Friends, and subsequently seen elsewhere): to be jumbled or tossed about, especially as on the waves.
• embayment (from an article in NY DEC’s Conservationist magazine): a bay or the surrounding coastal landform
• quiddity (from a China Miéville essay): an essential essence, perhaps found only in the details of a thing.
• adumbrated (from David Langford’s Omega Point entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [SFE], a reference that leans hard into esoteric terminology): foreshadowed.
• afflatus (from a John Clute quote in the Wikipedia article on Gordon Dickson): divine inspiration.
• empyrean (from a NYT Style article about Pat Sajak’s retirement): a heavenly region.
• octavo: a book formed by folding (and perhaps cutting) printed sheets into eighths; compare to the more common folio.
• mondegreen: a misheard lyric.
• vastation: devastation.
• factotum: a person or worker who performs many roles.

Are these words relics, raw materials, or highly refined terminological technology? Perhaps all of the above.

Posted on Thursday, December 12th, 2024. Tags: words.

Gormenghast Vocabuloot #2

I’m not quite halfway through Titus Groan, the first installment of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. It’s a peculiar book which merits a separate effort to describe. Briefly: the vibes are certainly gothic, but it isn’t edgy or grimdark; in fact, the characters and scenarios are really quite kooky. It reminds me of The Phantom Tollbooth or especially Roald Dahl’s work. What pulls me along is not necessarily the plot but the wry humor lurking in the locution of so many sentences.

Speaking of word choice: I admit I’m a fan of esoteric vocabulary. Here be more of the treasure I’ve picked up from Peake so far:

• Welkin: the sky or the heavens above.
• Cruet: a stoppered bottle for oil or vinegar (I knew the thing but not the name).
• Marl: a crumbly soil rich with calcium carbonate, traditional used to neutralize acidic soil for agriculture.
• Byre: a stable, barn, or “cow house”.
• Infanta: daughter of a monarch.
• Mantilla: lacy formal head scarf.
• Hake: fish.
• Lapsury:  one of Peake’s many portmanteaus; the lap of luxury.
• Fustian: a pretentious style of speech.
• Fructify: to bear fruit or become fruitful.
• Dropsical: swollen with fluid; inflicted with dropsy (edema).
• Pellucid: transparent.
• Abactinal: pertaining to the end opposite the mouth.
• [C]apparisoned: clothed?
• Interlarded: interspersed or interlaced.
• Calumny: defamation or deceptive description.

Posted on Friday, April 5th, 2024. Tags: words.

A Miscellany of New Words

I continue to assiduously note new words I encounter, not unlike a wee gnome giddily gathering charms from the floor of a wizard’s workshop. New spells for my sachet of incantations!

From the NYT:

• Zhuzh [up]: to spice up, figuratively; to add some extra oomph to something. A spoiler for the NYT mini crossword from March 13, 2024. For a full story about the word, see this Times article from a few years prior.
• Uxorious: Doting to the point of subservience in marital matters. From another NYT article.

From chapters by various authors in Field Notes on Science and Nature, edited by Michael Canfield:

• Taphonomy: the study of the process of decay and fossilization, or that process itself.
• Chador: a garment; used figuratively, as I recall, to describe something similarly veiled.
• Gentes; plural of gens: a clan or group of related individuals; specially, a subset of a [brood] parasite population that associates with a particular host.

From Orbital, by Samantha Harvey:

• Birling: logrolling. Here, the similarly centered motion of rotating planets and orbiting bodies.
• Scarper: to flee or escape.
• Tranche: a portion or slice (perhaps specifically financial).

Miscellaneous:

• Feculent: foul. From Jamie Ford’s Esperanto in A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams.
• Mojibake: gibberish that appears when text is rendered with the wrong character encoding. Learned the term while attempting to diagnose a misbehaving web browser.

Posted on Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024. Tags: words.

New Word Alert – Gormenghast #1

First, two cultural terms:

• Pagris: turbans, specifically those used in India
• Sawm: fasting, as one of the five pillars of Islam

A printmaking term:

• Quoin: an expanding device used to lock letterpress type in place. (Also a masonry term for cornerstones or keystones.)

Last but not least, a big batch of words from the beginning of Titus Groan, book one of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. I’ve had the omnibus for some time but just started reading it. It’s delightfully strange and surprisingly funny — and definitely rife with unfamiliar vocabulary.

• Cantonment: a military base or barracks.
• Recrudescent: like an outbreak, or reopening of wounds.
• Propinquintel or propinquity: proximity, especially as it pertains to relationships; kinship.
• Calid: hot! Hace calor.
• Rissole: a breaded delicacy.
• Pullulation: sprouting or proliferating; in context, teeming.
• Hayrick: aka a haystack.
• Spilth: that which hath been spilled.
• Rabous: new word alert, or not-a-word alert? Possibly a typo for rufous (or, less likely, raucous).

Posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2024. Tags: words.

New Word Alert

Some new-to-me words from some recent reads:

• Burin, an engraving tool. From Art Spiegelman’s introduction to the beautiful boxed set of Lynd Ward woodcut novels.

• The casuarina and manchineel, invasive and native trees, respectively, to the Caribbean. Via Broken From the Colony, by Ada M. Patterson.
• Paling, a spiky fencepost or a fence comprised of them, such as a palisade. Same source as above.
• Cathect, to invest with emotion. Same source.

• Comity, a state of harmonious interaction, especially of a polity. From John Clute’s SFE entry on the late Terry Bisson.
• Apothegm (or apophthegm), an aphorism. From Clute’s definition of equipoise in genre.
• Vade mecum, Latin for a guidebook or other everyday carry item. From the entry on China Miéville.

• Etiolate, to become pale from lack of light. Via The Bad Graft by Karen Russell in BASFF 2015.

Posted on Saturday, January 13th, 2024. Tags: words.

Word Haul

It’s a New Word Alert roundup!

• Theodicy, the defense of God in spite of the existence of evil, from a reference to C. S. Lewis in Louis Evan’s thread on war.
• Tumulus, a burial mound, from The Curse of the Horsetail Banner by Dariel R. A. Quiogue in New Edge Sword & Sorcery #0.
• Doyen, a senior member of a group, from Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s essay on dystopia in Uncanny Magazine #48.
• Crepitate, to make a crackling noise, and plangent, wistfully or perhaps even sorrowfully nostalgic, both from True Songs of the Pennyrile by Mark Rigney in LCRW #46.
• Omphaloskepsis: navel-gazing. I wrote this one down but I don’t remember where I encountered it.

Posted on Saturday, March 4th, 2023. Tags: words.

New Word Alert: Endling

This one’s sad. An endling is the last known living individual of a now-extinct species.

Arrived at this word by way of reading about the Thylacine. Very much worth a watch is this short film about a performance adaptation of a picture book titled The Dream of the Thylacine.

Posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2023. Tags: words.

New Word Alert!

Deaccession, to sell or otherwise let go from a collection.

Sort of the opposite of acquire. Weird that we don’t say dequire instead.

Hat tip!

Posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2023. Tags: words.

New Word Alert!

I like meeting new words. Today’s: coulee: a ravine, gully, or other erosion-related landscape feature that may or may not still contain water. Learned from Stephen Graham Jones’ Backbone of the World.

Posted on Friday, January 20th, 2023. Tags: words.