could possibly be a term for the interstice between teeth of a comb; some combs have two different sizes of teeth, with wider umpernaters between the thicker teeth, finer gaps between the thinner teeth.
. . . she was a very pretty woman with amber, velvety skin, golden hair, and luscious lips. In other words, a Chabeen" Richard Philcox's translation of Maryse Condé's The Gospel According to the New World, p. 57
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain's False Star short story in March 20 2023 New Yorker, has a Blackfeet Indian describe a girl friend's "oossii eyes," but it's not clear if this is Blackfeet or some other language.
Is this "renannouncement" a typo for "renouncement"? Henry James wouldn't mess with us, would he, in Ch X of The Figure in the Carpet? Wouldn't want to be "awfully intellectual!"
Norman Rush's Mating, pg 23, in section "One Can never have Too Much" of first chapter "Guilty Repose," has this sentence: "The cleaners and porters, not kids but mature black men, had to wear juvenilizing white outfits like sailorsuits—shorts, and jumpers with tallywhackers." Though tallywhackers are supposedly penises, it doesn't seem right that a sailorsuit should have a penis. Is this a clue that American narrator is not as adept with languages as she claims to be? Or is there another definition for "tallywhacker" that works with "jumpers," which are probably sweaters?
in Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi, the heroine wraps her husband's cravenette around her waist, but only her belly was successfully covered. Even tho she's been cheating on him, this sight"of her white arms and legs protruding from the red gown, like stems in a pot of boiled cabbage, clawed seductively at his heart." A cravenette, serge treated to be waterproof, would be used to keep off rain.
"smellfeast" was given as translation of pique-assiette in Ellen Marriage's version of Balzac's Cousin Pons. Scrounger, sponger, lick-dish, hanger-on would be other sorts of pique-assiette.
Marion Mainwaring sticks some italicized "guislas" in her first full chapter 30 of her completion to Edith Wharton's unfinished The Buccaneers. They're next to "witch-masks, scrimshaw-work," and an "enormous and handsome globe of the world which" may mean they're so exotic that nobody will ever know what a "guisla" is. Maybe a disguise of sort, like a mask? The room with the "guislas" belongs to a world-traveller, in strong opposition to the stay-at-home traditional English aristocrat.
Had to look this up when Marilynne Robinson used it in her latest novel, Jack: "His entire life was an engrossing confusion, very small change cosmically speaking, and still anything at all could loom up like a great foreshadowing and accuse him. A baffled struggle in a dark place. A veritable Jabbok. Some laming involved" (pg 258 in F,S&G, NY: 2020 1st edition). So this word gets used in Deuteronomy, and Biblical commentators claim it's the Zarka river, which in the Bible forms a border of Gilead. This Jabbok, or Zarka river is where Jacob wrestled with an angel, who renamed him Israel, and dislocated his hip in Genesis 32:22-32. Ok. Now that's all cleared up, I'm sure. Jack is for sure a preacher's son.
In Tarun Tejpal's The Alchemy of Desire, this barsati comes up often. Websurfing in South Asian cyberspace indicates it comes from Hindi, and means a habitable room or apartment on a roof of a building, rented or used as a bachelor pad or love nest, with enough space around it for lounging under the sky.
this LULZ gets used often in Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam sci fi. Seems it was more common around 2013, when it was, according to some Urban Dictionary entries, a corruption of lol as texting abbreviation for laugh out loud. Often used for laughter at the expense of another, or for doing something stupid just for laughs, aka for no reason, or for a bad reason.
from the first sentence of Chapter 1 in George Orwell's Animal Farm, and featured in Martin Amis' Money, where John Self can't manage to find out what pop-holes are. Seems they are holes that let the hens in and out of the coop. You can get an automatic pop-hole opener if, like Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, you tend to get "too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes."
In Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore, pg. 239 (NY: Harper Collins, 2002): ""At first I arranged the monks in a large pile, trying to keep the elbows and knees out of the eyes and yarbles, out of respect and in the spirit of the infinitely compassionate Buddha and stuff." Seems "yarbles" is from Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, in which "Nadsat" takes yarbles from Russian "yarblicka," for apples, meaning testicles.
OED has Grimp listed as a rare word, A trans vb to cause to mount; to elevate, haul up (0bs), b) intrans. to clamber, climb. As the French "grimper" is not at all rare, I'd guess T.S.Eliot was thinking of a steep place, where you could only move by tediously careful climbing. "There is no foothold," and you move at the risk of falling. So I would not expect a marshy swamp area would be a grimpen at all. Though when you read an abstruse poem like Eliot's Four Quartets, you have to do a lot of grimping, with no security and no guarantee that any particular reading is secure.
Sabra silk, aka cactus silk, vegetable silk, vegan silk, is made from agava fiber; Morocco has been making it for a long time. A luxury textile, takes lots of processing, and doesn't harm caterpillars the way real silk does. Geoffrey Renouard, in Conrad's Planter of Malata, is developing a vegetable fiber business on an East Indies island that could be agave, though the "silk plant" species is not specified.
Renouard, the Planter of Malata, sees the headland of his Indonesian island gloriously nimbed by the gold of rising sun. Conrad has this guy lost in love with a gorgeous gal out there in the boonies hunting for another dead buy Renouard has fairly recently buried! Ghosts. Secrets. Passion. Lots like Heart of Darkness, where a romantic halo of Love glows around a dead center.
In Nabokov's Pale Fire, the poetic lemniscate, left by bicycle tires in wet sand in line 137 of poet character Shade's masterpiece gets a comic gloss in Charles Kinbote's pseudo-academic "Commentary," where he complains: "'A unicursal bicircular quartic' says my weary old dictionary. I cannot understand what this has to do with bicycling and suspect that Shade's phrase has no real meaning." The weary old definition is nearly as nice as another gruesome dictionary's "the locus of the foot of the perpendicular from the centre of a conic upon the tangent"!!
Mark Haddon uses "Holoprosencephaly" as a one-word sentence in his The Red House (page 11), in his character Angela's tortured memory of a lost daughter, Karen, who's a ghost in this novel. Now if only I could remember the word for a one-word sentence. . . . Oh, right! Holophrase! (Or holophrasis, if we want to be technical.)
in Nabokov's Ada, a governess, through the ruckus of a barn fire, sleeps on: "snoring with a wheeze and a harkle," which may be Vladimir's onomatopoeic word for a gurgling in the back of a snoring throat: back there where you hawk a loogie.
In Ben Lerner's Topeka School, pg. 228: ". . . I hear the click of his dress shoes, the hard rubber soles, on the marley floor." Is this a Kansas thing, maybe?
Seems most "tems" are just typos, but in the bio for Stephen Chrisomalis, I come across it twice: "Dr. Stephen Chrisomalis (Wayne State University) is a linguistic anthropologist who specializes in the anthropology of mathematics and the interaction of language, cognition and culture. His four-field anthropological training includes work in cultural, cognitive, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology. His book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010, is a cross-cultural cognitive analysis of tems of written numerals as used over the past 5000 years. His work focuses on the relationship between individual cognition and broader social, political, and economic processes. Understanding how tems of number words and number symbols interact in specific contexts - how they are used rather than simply how they are structured - helps us to rethink assumptions such as the widely-held belief that we are now at the 'end of history' of number tems." Now, would Dr. Chisomalis allow two typos in his bio? His "Phrontistery" website is proof that he's really careful about words—beyond careful, really: nearly obsessed. Wonder if he knows that tems are (or is, if it's not plural nor typo)?
From the spinoff radio sit-com "The Great Gildersleeve," a character named Dr. Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve from Fibber McGee and Molly, is a pompous egotistical gassbag. He was pretty famous in America's Radioland in 40s & 50s, enough for a "Gildersleeve" to show up in nifty books to describe a character who takes himself way too seriously.
zari thread, in India and Pakistan, is flat metallic glittery thread that makes a sparkly fabric. The good old zari used real metals, but now cheap plastic zari thread in many different colors is more apt to be used.
This "ormonde" from Lolita, is in French "J'ai toujours admiré l'oeuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois," and seems to refer to James Joyce's Ulysses, where the barmaid at the Ormonde Hotel in the Sirens chapter deserves admiration. Ormonde besides being an ok word for a hotel, has a good pun in French as hors monde, ie beyond the world.
From Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Vol II Cosette, Book Third, Ch II "Two Complete Portraits," where the villainous tavern keeper Thénardier uses "quibus" to seem well-educated. It means "with which," and refers to his plunder from the dead at the battle of Waterloo, "with which" he had the means to invest in his tavern at Montfermeil. Isabelle Hapgood's translation around this word is much better than the Fahnestock/MacAfee/Wilbour version published by Signet, as it locates the use of the word (twice) in bad-guy Thénardier's lingo.
In Gaddis' The Recognitions: "He watched the thin wrist with its exaggerated rasceta disappear, and snatched the black-handled thing from the thin hand as it drew out of a pocket." p 673.
In Somerset Maugham's Up at the Villa: ". . . I used to wait till he was so blas that he let me lead him away and at last I could put him to bed." A typo?
in John Banville's The Untouchable, Prince Wilhelm makes the narrator picture "chainmail and lance and flashing tarnhelm," though why a magic cap that would make wearer invisible should flash may only show how high Banville will reach for an exotic obscure word.
I found "masoteric" in Mona Simpson's The Lost Father, where it's probably a misspelling of "masseteric," which is a jaw jerk reflex of the trigeminal nerve. With lower jaw held open a little, a downward blow to chin just below lower lip elicits a masseteric reflex, in which jaw jerks closed.
I love "zetetic," and wonder why I haven't seen it till now! As Pierre Bayle put it in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, "those of that Sect shew that we judge of things only by comparison, which they express thus, πάυτ πσός σι, omnia sunt ad aliquid."
in Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, kids' carseats don't quite fit in old car, which has no shoulder belts so the seats sigoggling may not be safe, but kids love it anyway; Wikipedia claims "sigogglin" is archaic Applachin word for something not built right, crooked, or out of balance.
". . . though at the moment collas swaying in the sun were not easy to conjure." So ends first page of D.R.MacDonald's Cape Breton Road novel. For sure not easy to conjure, these collas! Then again on page 177, "Fragrant collas by September, flower tops, that's where the money was." Is this Canadian druggie slang for sinsemilla?
Chlorers is druggie slang for chloroform, used to get high. It's anaesthesia would come in handy to "settle the nerves" of opium or morphine withdrawal. First found it in A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, where some people "indulged in 'chlorers'".
Rennie Airth's really good murder mystery, River of Darkness, has Madden remember "the pale gleam of moonpennies by the roadside. . . ." I never would have guessed they were flowers: common name oxeye daisy, aka Leucanthemum vulgare.
In Anne Lamott's Imperfect Birds, Rosie ". . . got an Altoids box from another pile of gear, and extracted a bit of black flug." From the context, you can tell this is char cloth, which works with reesetee's definition of flug as lint, also used for fire-starting tinder.
Stepan Trofimovich gets "cholerine" in Pevear & Volokhonsky's translation of Dostoevsky's Demons; in the Magarshack translation, Devils, Stepan gets "gastric catarrh"—seems it's just a bad case of the nervous drizzleshits.
"The place had been a tiny chapel to the penis, phallic devices of all makes and creeds, on display like shoes in a shoe store though without the BANNICKS and special chairs needed to be properly fitted." in Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf: New York, 2009, pg. 71. Moore plays with midwestern dialects in this novel; maybe "bannicks" are some sort of gizmo out there? Maybe she's just messing with our heads? Anybody heard of bannicks out there in the heartland? Or is this just the way a slightly illiterate undergrad narrator refers to "The Brannock Device®," a "foot-measuring device that is a must in all retail footwear stores"? Oh, ok, sorry, I should have known. . . .
Erin McKean, whose sister studied at UF with Padgett Powell as advisor, got this explanation from Powell: "The word is a made-up making-fun-of-Faulkner Latinate. It of course does
invoke whiskey and whiskers; the -ate makes it Faulkner (inchoate, insensate, etc.)."
The "small and vicious anthroparian" in Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark looks like he might be the man with no name who gets Harmon's boots when Harmon gets the boots of the guy who takes the boots Holme had been wearing since he swiped them from the squire he chopped stovewood for. The "anthrop-" would allude to anthropoid, since a man with no name is not quite human. The "-arian" may connote the politics of the agrarian movement, which tries to redistribute real estate more equitably but usually turns out much as violently as the murderous robbery of the wagon driver attacked on Pg 51. McCarthy makes up words like this to encourage readers to ponder. Think about walking a mile in the man with no name's boots, those stinky ones Culla Holme gets stuck with.
Cormac McCarthy uses "anthroparian" in Outer Dark describing an assualt on a wagon driver. The "anthrop-" probably refers to "anthropoid," as in "like a human, but not quite human." The "-arian" may be associated with "agrarian," as the socialist movement for fair distribution of land ownership could be somehow mockingly related to the Robin Hoodlum murderous robbery going on at Page 51 of Outer Dark. This nameless humanoid critter might be the same no-named guy travelling with Harmon and the "man" who takes Holme's stolen boots after the ferry accident.
Comments by 52james
52james commented on the word umpernater
could possibly be a term for the interstice between teeth of a comb; some combs have two different sizes of teeth, with wider umpernaters between the thicker teeth, finer gaps between the thinner teeth.
September 28, 2023
52james commented on the word chabeen
. . . she was a very pretty woman with amber, velvety skin, golden hair, and luscious lips. In other words, a Chabeen" Richard Philcox's translation of Maryse Condé's The Gospel According to the New World, p. 57
August 11, 2023
52james commented on the word oossii
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain's False Star short story in March 20 2023 New Yorker, has a Blackfeet Indian describe a girl friend's "oossii eyes," but it's not clear if this is Blackfeet or some other language.
April 10, 2023
52james commented on the word renannouncement
Is this "renannouncement" a typo for "renouncement"? Henry James wouldn't mess with us, would he, in Ch X of The Figure in the Carpet? Wouldn't want to be "awfully intellectual!"
April 8, 2023
52james commented on the word tallywhackers
Norman Rush's Mating, pg 23, in section "One Can never have Too Much" of first chapter "Guilty Repose," has this sentence: "The cleaners and porters, not kids but mature black men, had to wear juvenilizing white outfits like sailorsuits—shorts, and jumpers with tallywhackers." Though tallywhackers are supposedly penises, it doesn't seem right that a sailorsuit should have a penis. Is this a clue that American narrator is not as adept with languages as she claims to be? Or is there another definition for "tallywhacker" that works with "jumpers," which are probably sweaters?
December 6, 2022
52james commented on the word cravenette
in Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi, the heroine wraps her husband's cravenette around her waist, but only her belly was successfully covered. Even tho she's been cheating on him, this sight"of her white arms and legs protruding from the red gown, like stems in a pot of boiled cabbage, clawed seductively at his heart." A cravenette, serge treated to be waterproof, would be used to keep off rain.
November 19, 2022
52james commented on the word smellfeast
"smellfeast" was given as translation of pique-assiette in Ellen Marriage's version of Balzac's Cousin Pons. Scrounger, sponger, lick-dish, hanger-on would be other sorts of pique-assiette.
September 30, 2022
52james commented on the list nifty-book-words
from Balzac's Physiology of Marriage. Might have something to do with eugenics or puericulture? Related to the beautiful "calli" in callipygian?
September 2, 2022
52james commented on the word splothery
Pat Barker's Double Vision has "A few flakes of snow, fat, splothery, loose flakes" falling on page 74. Splother? Bothersomely sloppy?
February 17, 2022
52james commented on the word guislas
Marion Mainwaring sticks some italicized "guislas" in her first full chapter 30 of her completion to Edith Wharton's unfinished The Buccaneers. They're next to "witch-masks, scrimshaw-work," and an "enormous and handsome globe of the world which" may mean they're so exotic that nobody will ever know what a "guisla" is. Maybe a disguise of sort, like a mask? The room with the "guislas" belongs to a world-traveller, in strong opposition to the stay-at-home traditional English aristocrat.
March 10, 2021
52james commented on the word Jabbok
Had to look this up when Marilynne Robinson used it in her latest novel, Jack: "His entire life was an engrossing confusion, very small change cosmically speaking, and still anything at all could loom up like a great foreshadowing and accuse him. A baffled struggle in a dark place. A veritable Jabbok. Some laming involved" (pg 258 in F,S&G, NY: 2020 1st edition). So this word gets used in Deuteronomy, and Biblical commentators claim it's the Zarka river, which in the Bible forms a border of Gilead. This Jabbok, or Zarka river is where Jacob wrestled with an angel, who renamed him Israel, and dislocated his hip in Genesis 32:22-32. Ok. Now that's all cleared up, I'm sure. Jack is for sure a preacher's son.
January 25, 2021
52james commented on the word barsati
In Tarun Tejpal's The Alchemy of Desire, this barsati comes up often. Websurfing in South Asian cyberspace indicates it comes from Hindi, and means a habitable room or apartment on a roof of a building, rented or used as a bachelor pad or love nest, with enough space around it for lounging under the sky.
January 22, 2021
52james commented on the word LULZ
this LULZ gets used often in Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam sci fi. Seems it was more common around 2013, when it was, according to some Urban Dictionary entries, a corruption of lol as texting abbreviation for laugh out loud. Often used for laughter at the expense of another, or for doing something stupid just for laughs, aka for no reason, or for a bad reason.
November 28, 2020
52james commented on the word pop-holes
from the first sentence of Chapter 1 in George Orwell's Animal Farm, and featured in Martin Amis' Money, where John Self can't manage to find out what pop-holes are. Seems they are holes that let the hens in and out of the coop. You can get an automatic pop-hole opener if, like Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, you tend to get "too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes."
October 31, 2020
52james commented on the word yarble
In Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore, pg. 239 (NY: Harper Collins, 2002): ""At first I arranged the monks in a large pile, trying to keep the elbows and knees out of the eyes and yarbles, out of respect and in the spirit of the infinitely compassionate Buddha and stuff." Seems "yarbles" is from Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, in which "Nadsat" takes yarbles from Russian "yarblicka," for apples, meaning testicles.
October 26, 2020
52james commented on the word grimpen
OED has Grimp listed as a rare word, A trans vb to cause to mount; to elevate, haul up (0bs), b) intrans. to clamber, climb. As the French "grimper" is not at all rare, I'd guess T.S.Eliot was thinking of a steep place, where you could only move by tediously careful climbing. "There is no foothold," and you move at the risk of falling. So I would not expect a marshy swamp area would be a grimpen at all. Though when you read an abstruse poem like Eliot's Four Quartets, you have to do a lot of grimping, with no security and no guarantee that any particular reading is secure.
October 23, 2020
52james commented on the word Sabra silk
Sabra silk, aka cactus silk, vegetable silk, vegan silk, is made from agava fiber; Morocco has been making it for a long time. A luxury textile, takes lots of processing, and doesn't harm caterpillars the way real silk does. Geoffrey Renouard, in Conrad's Planter of Malata, is developing a vegetable fiber business on an East Indies island that could be agave, though the "silk plant" species is not specified.
October 7, 2020
52james commented on the list nifty-book-words
Renouard, the Planter of Malata, sees the headland of his Indonesian island gloriously nimbed by the gold of rising sun. Conrad has this guy lost in love with a gorgeous gal out there in the boonies hunting for another dead buy Renouard has fairly recently buried! Ghosts. Secrets. Passion. Lots like Heart of Darkness, where a romantic halo of Love glows around a dead center.
October 7, 2020
52james commented on the list pale-fire--2
why isn't tintarron in this Pale Fire list?
August 11, 2020
52james commented on the word tintarron
maybe this means deep blue, like a rare glass? like a rare butterfly?
August 11, 2020
52james commented on the word lemniscate
In Nabokov's Pale Fire, the poetic lemniscate, left by bicycle tires in wet sand in line 137 of poet character Shade's masterpiece gets a comic gloss in Charles Kinbote's pseudo-academic "Commentary," where he complains: "'A unicursal bicircular quartic' says my weary old dictionary. I cannot understand what this has to do with bicycling and suspect that Shade's phrase has no real meaning." The weary old definition is nearly as nice as another gruesome dictionary's "the locus of the foot of the perpendicular from the centre of a conic upon the tangent"!!
August 11, 2020
52james commented on the word holoprosencephaly
Mark Haddon uses "Holoprosencephaly" as a one-word sentence in his The Red House (page 11), in his character Angela's tortured memory of a lost daughter, Karen, who's a ghost in this novel. Now if only I could remember the word for a one-word sentence. . . . Oh, right! Holophrase! (Or holophrasis, if we want to be technical.)
August 5, 2020
52james commented on the word auxeticity
Yes, we're all wondering what origami metamaterials do to reverse their auxeticity!
July 28, 2020
52james commented on the word empasmed
In Nabokov's Ada: "The handmaids pounced upon them like pards, and having empasmed them . . ., turned the three . . . over to me."
July 20, 2020
52james commented on the word tegular
In Ada: ". . .the tegular pattern of her brilliant plumage which Tresham had rendered with ornithological skill."
July 17, 2020
52james commented on the word harkle
in Nabokov's Ada, a governess, through the ruckus of a barn fire, sleeps on: "snoring with a wheeze and a harkle," which may be Vladimir's onomatopoeic word for a gurgling in the back of a snoring throat: back there where you hawk a loogie.
July 17, 2020
52james commented on the word marley floor
In Ben Lerner's Topeka School, pg. 228: ". . . I hear the click of his dress shoes, the hard rubber soles, on the marley floor." Is this a Kansas thing, maybe?
July 14, 2020
52james commented on the word tems
Seems most "tems" are just typos, but in the bio for Stephen Chrisomalis, I come across it twice: "Dr. Stephen Chrisomalis (Wayne State University) is a linguistic anthropologist who specializes in the anthropology of mathematics and the interaction of language, cognition and culture. His four-field anthropological training includes work in cultural, cognitive, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology. His book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010, is a cross-cultural cognitive analysis of tems of written numerals as used over the past 5000 years. His work focuses on the relationship between individual cognition and broader social, political, and economic processes. Understanding how tems of number words and number symbols interact in specific contexts - how they are used rather than simply how they are structured - helps us to rethink assumptions such as the widely-held belief that we are now at the 'end of history' of number tems." Now, would Dr. Chisomalis allow two typos in his bio? His "Phrontistery" website is proof that he's really careful about words—beyond careful, really: nearly obsessed. Wonder if he knows that tems are (or is, if it's not plural nor typo)?
July 4, 2020
52james commented on the word gildersleeve
From the spinoff radio sit-com "The Great Gildersleeve," a character named Dr. Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve from Fibber McGee and Molly, is a pompous egotistical gassbag. He was pretty famous in America's Radioland in 40s & 50s, enough for a "Gildersleeve" to show up in nifty books to describe a character who takes himself way too seriously.
July 4, 2020
52james commented on the word zari
zari thread, in India and Pakistan, is flat metallic glittery thread that makes a sparkly fabric. The good old zari used real metals, but now cheap plastic zari thread in many different colors is more apt to be used.
July 2, 2020
52james commented on the word ormonde
This "ormonde" from Lolita, is in French "J'ai toujours admiré l'oeuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois," and seems to refer to James Joyce's Ulysses, where the barmaid at the Ormonde Hotel in the Sirens chapter deserves admiration. Ormonde besides being an ok word for a hotel, has a good pun in French as hors monde, ie beyond the world.
July 2, 2020
52james commented on the word quibus
From Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Vol II Cosette, Book Third, Ch II "Two Complete Portraits," where the villainous tavern keeper Thénardier uses "quibus" to seem well-educated. It means "with which," and refers to his plunder from the dead at the battle of Waterloo, "with which" he had the means to invest in his tavern at Montfermeil. Isabelle Hapgood's translation around this word is much better than the Fahnestock/MacAfee/Wilbour version published by Signet, as it locates the use of the word (twice) in bad-guy Thénardier's lingo.
December 26, 2018
52james commented on the word rasceta
In Gaddis' The Recognitions: "He watched the thin wrist with its exaggerated rasceta disappear, and snatched the black-handled thing from the thin hand as it drew out of a pocket." p 673.
December 2, 2018
52james commented on the word blas
In Somerset Maugham's Up at the Villa: ". . . I used to wait till he was so blas that he let me lead him away and at last I could put him to bed." A typo?
October 24, 2018
52james commented on the list nifty-book-words
in John Banville's The Untouchable, Prince Wilhelm makes the narrator picture "chainmail and lance and flashing tarnhelm," though why a magic cap that would make wearer invisible should flash may only show how high Banville will reach for an exotic obscure word.
September 5, 2018
52james commented on the word masoteric
I found "masoteric" in Mona Simpson's The Lost Father, where it's probably a misspelling of "masseteric," which is a jaw jerk reflex of the trigeminal nerve. With lower jaw held open a little, a downward blow to chin just below lower lip elicits a masseteric reflex, in which jaw jerks closed.
March 24, 2016
52james commented on the user 52james
I love "zetetic," and wonder why I haven't seen it till now! As Pierre Bayle put it in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, "those of that Sect shew that we judge of things only by comparison, which they express thus, πάυτ πσός σι, omnia sunt ad aliquid."
December 10, 2014
52james commented on the word sigoggling
in Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, kids' carseats don't quite fit in old car, which has no shoulder belts so the seats sigoggling may not be safe, but kids love it anyway; Wikipedia claims "sigogglin" is archaic Applachin word for something not built right, crooked, or out of balance.
October 30, 2014
52james commented on the word collas
". . . though at the moment collas swaying in the sun were not easy to conjure." So ends first page of D.R.MacDonald's Cape Breton Road novel. For sure not easy to conjure, these collas! Then again on page 177, "Fragrant collas by September, flower tops, that's where the money was." Is this Canadian druggie slang for sinsemilla?
June 23, 2014
52james commented on the word chlorer
Chlorers is druggie slang for chloroform, used to get high. It's anaesthesia would come in handy to "settle the nerves" of opium or morphine withdrawal. First found it in A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, where some people "indulged in 'chlorers'".
December 1, 2013
52james commented on the word moon-penny
Rennie Airth's really good murder mystery, River of Darkness, has Madden remember "the pale gleam of moonpennies by the roadside. . . ." I never would have guessed they were flowers: common name oxeye daisy, aka Leucanthemum vulgare.
October 27, 2012
52james commented on the word flug
In Anne Lamott's Imperfect Birds, Rosie ". . . got an Altoids box from another pile of gear, and extracted a bit of black flug." From the context, you can tell this is char cloth, which works with reesetee's definition of flug as lint, also used for fire-starting tinder.
July 13, 2012
52james commented on the word cholerine
Stepan Trofimovich gets "cholerine" in Pevear & Volokhonsky's translation of Dostoevsky's Demons; in the Magarshack translation, Devils, Stepan gets "gastric catarrh"—seems it's just a bad case of the nervous drizzleshits.
October 2, 2011
52james commented on the word bannick
"The place had been a tiny chapel to the penis, phallic devices of all makes and creeds, on display like shoes in a shoe store though without the BANNICKS and special chairs needed to be properly fitted." in Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf: New York, 2009, pg. 71. Moore plays with midwestern dialects in this novel; maybe "bannicks" are some sort of gizmo out there? Maybe she's just messing with our heads? Anybody heard of bannicks out there in the heartland? Or is this just the way a slightly illiterate undergrad narrator refers to "The Brannock Device®," a "foot-measuring device that is a must in all retail footwear stores"? Oh, ok, sorry, I should have known. . . .
December 27, 2009
52james commented on the word whiskate
Erin McKean, whose sister studied at UF with Padgett Powell as advisor, got this explanation from Powell: "The word is a made-up making-fun-of-Faulkner Latinate. It of course does
invoke whiskey and whiskers; the -ate makes it Faulkner (inchoate, insensate, etc.)."
November 24, 2009
52james commented on the list nifty-book-words
The "small and vicious anthroparian" in Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark looks like he might be the man with no name who gets Harmon's boots when Harmon gets the boots of the guy who takes the boots Holme had been wearing since he swiped them from the squire he chopped stovewood for. The "anthrop-" would allude to anthropoid, since a man with no name is not quite human. The "-arian" may connote the politics of the agrarian movement, which tries to redistribute real estate more equitably but usually turns out much as violently as the murderous robbery of the wagon driver attacked on Pg 51. McCarthy makes up words like this to encourage readers to ponder. Think about walking a mile in the man with no name's boots, those stinky ones Culla Holme gets stuck with.
October 7, 2009
52james commented on the word anthroparian
Cormac McCarthy uses "anthroparian" in Outer Dark describing an assualt on a wagon driver. The "anthrop-" probably refers to "anthropoid," as in "like a human, but not quite human." The "-arian" may be associated with "agrarian," as the socialist movement for fair distribution of land ownership could be somehow mockingly related to the Robin Hoodlum murderous robbery going on at Page 51 of Outer Dark. This nameless humanoid critter might be the same no-named guy travelling with Harmon and the "man" who takes Holme's stolen boots after the ferry accident.
October 7, 2009