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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Timmy’s voice and the rattle of the train’s subterraneous plunge were alike drowned in awful and bewildering clamour. A pandemonium of sound, latrant, mugient, reboatory, and beyond all words, reverberated between the walls of the tunnel. The multitude of the damned, vocal with all the sad variety of hell, could scarcely have surpassed the momentary effect of horror.
Michael Innes is the archetype of the late Golden Age "donnish" mystery writers, throwing around words such as "minatory", "exiguous", "nugatory" with scholarly abandon. Here he outdoes himself: these words weren't even in my usually reliable New Oxford Dictionary. They all mean a roaring or lowing sound, as of animals.
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Timmy’s voice and the rattle of the train’s subterraneous plunge were alike drowned in awful and bewildering clamour. A pandemonium of sound, latrant, mugient, reboatory, and beyond all words, reverberated between the walls of the tunnel. The multitude of the damned, vocal with all the sad variety of hell, could scarcely have surpassed the momentary effect of horror.
Three great and rAre words!
Mrs Birdwire and Lady Pike had begun to disembogue.
Disembogue? Now there's a good word, as Polonius might say.
Mr Eliot, at once wet and faintly luminous like a corposant
Corposant, that's good.
I don’t know who was at the bottom of it originally. Wedge, I expect. That man’s at the bottom of darn near everything.
Clue or red herring?
