This Week in Word of the Day – 12/2/12
From my daily writing indulgence …
fainaigue \fuh-NEYG\, verb:
1. To shirk; evade work or responsibility.
2. To renege at cards.
A gentleman tramp in the finest Chaplin tradition, Reginald saw himself as an indispensable facet of the American experience. It was his role in society to remind, with a pleasant smile and in educated diction, that the dream does not touch us all. He did not have to resort to brutishness or emotional blackmail while undertaking the fine art of panhandling, instead projecting the gentile and accommodating spirit from his days as a hotel concierge. Being a vagrant was not fainaiguing a livelihood, but the most serious of all occupations. It is to sacrifice health, comfort, and fortune to live as a reminder of the moral obligation of prosperity.
svelte \SFELT\, adjective:
1. Slender, especially gracefully slender in figure.
2. Suave; blandly urbane.
Being a svelte and refined man about town, Reginald strolled the bars, clubs, and other gathering grounds of the fairer sex with unflappable confidence that, despite a horse’s overbite and skin as pockmarked as the moon, his over-sized charisma and silver tongue would win the heart of even the most elusive prey. To the astonishment of his friends as well as the women who wandered into his sights, he was always right in the end.
rime \RAHYM\, noun:
A coating of tiny, white, granular ice particles, caused by the rapid freezing of water droplets.
The face paralyzed him. A mournful gaze into the horizon, a thin sheen of rime glistening in the morning sun. Paul was not a sentimental man, but the statue’s woeful eyes unsettled the last memory of his mother as she watched him leave home at the age of 16, abandoning the frail woman to the viscous tyrant that replaced his father. Paul never questioned his decision because he’d come so far, achieved so much, but the guilt ran deep and, for that long, cold winter morning as he stared up at the cemetery angel, his slumbering heart stirred and urged him down a new path that would guide him away from the bustling big city and back to the swamps of Louisiana.
biblioklept \BIB-lee-uh-klept\, noun:
A person who steals books.
Meredith’s shattered heart left her withered and hemorrhaging, barely able to manage a smile when her young son scampered in the room. He didn’t know and she had no plans of telling him until she couldn’t avoid it any longer. In the following days, she adopted a simple ritual to force her day into motion. Waking with the dawn, walking the two miles to the local library and slipping a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex” under her shirt. After skirting around the sensors, she would read five pages and then return the book to the outside bookdrop. The harmless biblioklept couldn’t say why the ritual was important, but it was and it held her fragile life together so she could be strong for her child and begin rebuilding their lives.
Trundle
n.
1. A small wheel or roller.
2. The motion or noise of rolling.
3. A trundle bed.
4. A low-wheeled cart; a dolly.
v. trun·dled, trun·dling, trun·dles
v.tr.
1. To push or propel on wheels or rollers.
2. To spin; twirl.
v.intr.
To move along by or as if by rolling or spinning.Never has the Peter Pan complex been undertaken with such elegance and resilience than by Pat and Betty Wilhelm. The vibrant and ageless couple have been fixtures of the Beatnicks, the hippies, the punks, the New Wavers and the grunge movement. Now, as Betty trundles Pat in his wheelchair through Occupy protests and Burning Man festivals, the happy pair still dance with the abandon of children. Even if their bodies are tethered, more than ever, to the uncaring earth, their spirits still soar into the either.
empurple \em-PUR-puhl\, verb:
1. To color or become purple or purplish.
2. To darken or redden; flush.
The boy pulled her into his arms and kissed her madly. In front of her family, in front of his friends, with her every possession stuffed into a Uhaul headed for San Francisco, the moment she’d dreamed of had finally arrived. When he slid away and breathed a heavy goodbye, she was too stunned to reply. Her father had empurpled with rage and her mother was trying not to cry. No one said a thing. Instead, they piled into the family sedan and she watched her first great love disappear from her life forever.
alexipharmic \uh-lek-suh-FAHR-mik\, adjective:
1. Warding off poisoning or infection; antidotal; prophylactic.
2. An alexipharmic agent, especially an internal antidote.
The young man joined the priesthood in the belief that the clergy was the only alexipharmic answer to the intellectual corruption of love. With his passion stifled by spiritual commitment, he was certain his purpose would sharpen and the agony of heartache would be a thing of the past, but that all fell apart the moment Mary Elizabeth sat down in his confessional booth.
