solitude_stands

Comments by solitude_stands

• solitude_stands commented on the word washstrake

  "No one has ever uncovered even a scrap of a Lapita canoe—it has been too long, the materials are too perishable, the atmosphere too damp—but words for sail, outrigger, boom, washstrake, rib, caulking, paddle, bailing, and cargo can all be reconstructed in Proto-Oceanic, a hypothetical language (like Proto-Indo-European) that is associated with the Lapita expansion."

  — Sea People by Christina Thompson, p 228

  January 11, 2026

• solitude_stands commented on the word megapode

  "Before the arrival of human beings, New Caledonia had one of the most diverse collections of reptiles anywhere on the planet, including a giant horned turtle with a spiked tail, a twenty-pound monitor lizard, and a rare pygmy land crocodile, all of which—along with a giant megapode, a flightless swamp hen, two falcons, a scrub fowl, and several other species of bird—are now extinct."

  Sea People by Christina Thompson, p 223

  January 10, 2026

• solitude_stands commented on the word kahawai

  "It is a barren, windswept place, but rich in marine resources, including kahawai and whitebait, eels, herring, flounder, and shellfish."

  Sea People by Christina Thompson, p 206

  January 10, 2026

• solitude_stands commented on the word cavalla

  "Embarking on a voyage to avenge his father's death, Rata faces a series of oceanic dangers, each of which—in an interesting detail—he at first mistakes for land: a giant school of fish that threatens to swamp his canoe; a swordfish that tries to pierce the hull; a powerful, predatory giant cavalla; a monstrous clam that tries to suck the canoe in through its terrible valves."

  Sea People by Christina Thompson, p 163

  January 4, 2026

• solitude_stands commented on the word tridacna

  "Or they may be beset by monsters from the deep: enormous octopuses, murderous billfish, giant tridacnas."

  Sea People by Christina Thompson, p 162

  January 4, 2026

• solitude_stands commented on the word billfish

  "Or they may be beset by monsters from the deep: enormous octopuses, murderous billfish, giant tridacnas."

  Sea People by Christina Thompson, p 162

  January 4, 2026

• solitude_stands commented on the word scoria

  "There was no real evidence for this, though one writer, pointing to the ubiquitous traces of vulcanism—the scoria, basalt, pumice, and blocks of black glass—that could be found through the islands, concluded that the Pacific, that watery waste, must at some earlier time have been an "abode of fire.""

  - Sea People by Christina Thompson, p 121

  January 4, 2026

• solitude_stands commented on the word bêche-de-mer

  "The dream of Terra Australis Incognita, with its imagined hoard of silk, spices, and gold, was gone, but the Pacific offered a broad range of exploitable products: fur seals, sandalwood, flax, timber, pearl and turtle shell, bêche-de-mer, and, of course, that most lucrative and alluring of all the ocean's resources: whales."

  - Sea People by Christina Thompson, p 116

  January 4, 2026

• solitude_stands commented on the word calanque

  "They had some trouble finding the correct ferry. Most people were boarding another one, to go swimming at the calanques."

  - "Marseille" by Ayşegül Savaş, in the April 7, 2025 issue of the New Yorker

  April 17, 2025

• solitude_stands commented on the word bolide

  "But he remained central to our lives, and in his absence, we felt like dislodged bolides wobbling about the universe without orbit."

  - Roman Year by André Aciman

  March 31, 2025

• solitude_stands commented on the word baldric

  "Jesus glided out of the dark with underwater fluency; he was resplendent in a short crimson gown, a large velvet hat trimmed with lynx, a golden girdle around his waist, and a golden baldric trailing behind."

  - Margery Kempe by Robert Glück (though I came across it quoted by Danielle Dutton in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other)

  August 8, 2024