Wonderous Words
Been a bit busy so I haven’t had the chance to post this lately! Thanks to Bermuda Onion for hosting!
A Brief History of the Vikings by Jonathan Clemens:
atavistic
“The Ice Age lingered longer in its mountainous, northern regions, and much of its atavistic power can still be felt in a Scandinavian winter.”
Relating to old or established pattern; habitual, ingrained.
Secret Vampire by L.J. Smith
augur
“It didn’t augur well for the rest of James’s plan.”
Bode, indicate by signs.
Dirt Music by Tim Winton:
mulga
“All afternoon from the windblown tray of the Landcruiser he watches the mulga country gradually transformed by the emergence of granite breakaways.”
Semi-arid scrub of predominantly Acacia aneura that covers a significant portion of mainland Australia.
gibber
“He tries to imagine the gibber plains and red dunes to the east, the impossible amplitude of the continent.”
Stones in a desert pavement.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson:
extemporised
“We sat on the stone’s base and she thanked the Lord we had managed the ascent. Then she extemporised on the nature of the world, the folly of its peoples, and the wrath of God inevitable. ”
Improvise.
The Civil War by Bruce Catton:
amalgamation
“In the North there had risen the new Republican Party, an amalgamation of former Whigs, free-soilers, business leaders who wanted a central government that would protect industry, and ordinary folk who wanted a homestead act that would provide free farms in the West.”
Merger, combination.
Um. So…
I think I have a problem?
And then I maybe sort of pulled everything out of one of my closets and piled books in them all the way to the back. :[
More words!
Time for more words on Wednesday, as hosted by Bermuda Onion. I only have a few this week as I’ve been busy working on commissions, but I’ve been digging into my Australian lit books lately so I’ve been bumping into some interesting words lately. Here are a few I didn’t know:
Dirt Music by Tim Winton:
surreptitious
“Whether it was surreptitious or merely considerate, the whole procedure was extraordinary in its quiet and speed.”
Furtive: marked by quiet and caution and secrecy.
pilchards
“She felt the percussion of the dog hitting the water behind her and sturck out in her lazy schoolgirl freestyle until she was admist moored lobster boats with their fug of corrosion and birdshit and pilchards.”
Sardine: small fatty fish usually canned .
daubs
“But the word came so hot and wet and sudden, screamed into her face by a nine-year-old whose night terrors she’d soothed, whose body she’d bathed and held so often, whose grief-muddy daubs she’d clamped to the fridge, that she didn’t even hear the sentence it came wrapped in.”
Wattle & daub, commonly used building materials for colonial Australian houses. In this context, a childish painting.
What to do with Nancy Drew (and the Hardy Boys!)
So, I managed to acquire the first six Nancy Drew books over Bookmooch.com. I’m very excited about it, as throughout my childhood I would always see the very extensive series in my library but for some reason never actually got around to checking them out. I always admired their covers and the idea for the premise of the series, as something as simplistic as a girl detective appealed to me as a child.
I also managed to snag the first three Hardy Boys books. They all look very comfortable together on my bookshelf right now, and I can’t wait to get to them. But I was wondering – because this is such a very long series, should I bother making a post for each one, or should I stick them on my YA/Juvenile list as I am with a few other longrunning children’s series that I don’t feel are really worth reviewing at this time (maybe when I complete the series I can make an extensive post about the series as a whole?) In fact, what do you guys think of the books that are on there to begin with? I would really like to have all of them have their own separate post, but they were just clogging up on my blog and I wanted to make it seem clean and interesting to people that stopped by. Rather than seeing my reviews of books that were actually of some interest to them, instead they would see reviews of Goosebumps 7 through 40 or Animorphs 9 through 20 or something and I just don’t think it gave the right impression of this blog.
Any thoughts? Thanks!
Wonderous Words Wednesday!
Participating for the first time! Hosted by Bermuda Onion. I have a bad habit of just using context clues or guessing when I come to a word in a book I don’t know, so hopefully this will help encourage the good habit of actually looking them up and adding to my vocabulary!
Vampire Kisses by Ellen Schreiber:
probate
“My dad says that’s because it’s in probate.”
Probate is the legal process of administering the estate of a deceased person by resolving all claims and distributing the deceased person’s property under the valid will.
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne:
undulations
“The undulations of this infinite succession of mountains, whose patches of snow looked like foam, reminded one of the surface of a stormy sea.”
Wavelike motion; a gentle rising and falling in the manner of waves.
sylphs
“I forgot who I was and where I was, living the life of the elves and sylphs of Scandinavian mythology.”
Sylph (also called sylphid) is a mythological creature in the Western tradition. The term originates in Paracelsus, who describes sylphs as invisible beings of the air, his elementals of air.
blunderbuss
“I was involuntarily reminded of a huge, funnel-shaped blunderbuss, and the comparison alarmed me.”
A short musket of wide bore with a flared muzzle.
sonorous
“Their fall awoke reverberating echoes which were strangely sonorous.”
Capable of giving out a deep, resonant sound.
aperture
“I raised my head and saw above me the upper aperture of the core, framing a greatly reduced but almost perfectly circular patch of sky.”
A hole or an opening through which light travels.
gnomon
“That sharp peak could in fact be regarded as the gnomon of a sun-dial, whose shadow on a given day pointed out the way to the centre of the earth.”
Indicator provided by the stationary arm whose shadow indicates the time on the sundial.
stratum
“We are in the middle of the primordial stratum, in which the chemical operation took place of metals catching fire at the contact of air and water.”
One of several parallel layers of material arranged one on top of another.
gneiss
“What is more, in the neighbourhood of an extinct volcano, and through gneiss, it has been observed that the rise of temperature is one degree only for 125 feet.”
A laminated metamorphic rock similar to granite.
avoncular
“Was he refusing, out of avuncular or scientific vanity, to admit that he had made a mistake in choosing the eastern tunnel?”
In the manner of an uncle, pertaining to an uncle.
Until next Wednesday!
