Jonas David's Blog, page 2

new words – tenon

Only about 50 pages left and still regularly encountering gorgeous sentences with interesting words.

Tenon – a projecting member in a piece of wood or other material for insertion into a mortise to make a joint

From The Orchard Keeper:

“They go on–steps soft now in the rank humus earth, or where carapaced with lichens the texture of old green velvet, or wet and spongy earth tenoned with roots, the lecherous ganglia of things growing–coming down, pursuing the shadowline into the smoking river valley.”

new words – purlieu

There are endless gorgeous descriptions of nature in this book. If it’s not clear by now I recommend it. This word sounded familiar to me but it turns out I didn’t know it after all.

Purlieu – an outlying or adjacent district. Environ, neighborhood

And here is the sentence, from The Orchard Keeper:

“Far below them shades of cloud moved up the valley floor like water flowing, darkened the quilted purlieus, moved on, the brushed land gone green and umber once again.”

new words – mendicant and gramarye

Mendicant has two definitions, the first being a beggar, but I think the second definition fits better here.

Mendicant – a member of a religious order (such as the Franciscans) combining monastic life and outside religious activity and originally owning neither personal nor community property. A friar

Gramarye – necromancy, magic, enchantment

Here is the sentence, again from The Orchard Keeper, describing someone waking up after falling unconscious in the woods:

“With grass in his mouth the old man sat up and peered about him, heard the rain mendicant-voiced, soft chanting in that dark gramarye that summons the earth to bridehood.”

new words – isinglass

A pretty word I’ve not seen before, an obscure definition but one I might try to use in the future.

Isinglass – a semitransparent whitish very pure gelatin prepared from the air bladders of fishes and used especially as a clarifying agent and in jellies and glue

The sentence, from The Orchard Keeper:

“The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes: the shapeless splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of pole lamps across to meet them.”

new words – carillon and seafan

This is turning out to be such a beautiful book, and this is one of my favorite moments yet. I love nature writing in general, and McCarthy is so good at capturing the beauty of nature and mundane humanity at once.

Carillon – a set of fixed chromatically tuned bells sounded by hammers controlled from a keyboard

Sea fan (McCarthy removes the space, but it is not usually written that way) – any of various gorgonian corals with a compressed fan-shaped skeleton

From The Orchard Keeper again:

“The trees were all encased in ice, limbless-looking where their black trunks rose in aureoles of lace, bright seafans shimmering in the wind and tinkling with an endless bell-like sound, a carillon in miniature, and glittering shards of ice falling in sporadic hail everywhere through the woods and marking the snow with incomprehensible runes.”

new words – vespertine

I was familiar with the word vesper, so I knew what this meant, but the sentence is too good not to share, and it’s true that this use of the word is new to me.

Vespertine – of, relating to, or occurring in the evening

The sentence, still from The Orchard Keeper:

“They moved out under the dark trees, through a stand of young cedars gathered in a clearing, vespertine figures, rotund and druidical in their black solemnity.”

new words – prelate

Still not even halfway through The Orchard Keeper, here is another word I’ve never seen.

Prelate – an ecclesiastic (such as a bishop or abbot) of superior rank

And here is the start of a long sentence:

“John Shell, looking like nothing so much as an ill-assembled manikin of bones on which clothes were hung in sagging dusty folds, his wrists protruding like weathered sticks from his flapping prelate sleeves…”

new words – millrace

I liked this description, encountered yet again in The Orchard Keeper, and wanted to copy it down even before I got to this new word, which thankfully gave me a reason to post it.

Millrace – a canal in which water flows to and from a mill wheel

“… they went out the kitchen door into the new morning, the air clear and cold as springwater, shreds of mist lifting off the mountain above them and light pouring through the gap like a millrace.”

new words – sedulous

I had assumed this might mean something like slow, or lethargic, but I was wrong.

Sedulous – involving or accomplished with careful perseverance

The end of a long sentence, from The Orchard Keeper:

“… the men locking and unlocking the chains sedulously.”

new words – pitchblende

Perhaps you can guess a kind of meaning based on the word pitch, but it is a very specific definition that I didn’t know.

Pitchblende – a brown to black mineral that consists of massive uraninite, has a distinctive luster, contains radium, and is the chief ore-mineral source of uranium

The sentence, from The Orchard Keeper, describing some tree branches in a pit, wherein a body also lies:

“It took a year’s weather to fret them into the aromatic humus which steeped in what rainwater the pit held and so rendered in turn a tannic liquor dark as pitchblende by which the old man fancied had long been stained the wormscored bones that lay here.”