Friday Vocabulary

1. farrago — confused mixture, hotchpotch, medley Even taking the few moments needed to look up the actual facts to rebut this farrago of nonsense is a waste of my time.   2. crassities — [obsolete] materiality, density The soul must be devoid of crassities, taught the philosopher, else it could be broken into separate …

Friday Vocabulary

1. scorbutic — of, related to, or symptomatic of scurvy The words of denial escaped painfully from his swollen, scorbutic gums.   2. undercroft — underground chamber or vault, crypt The keys to the undercroft had gone missing in my grandfather’s time, so the police were forced to wrench open the rusted gates during their …

One Hundred and Nineteen Thousand (119,000) Songs

Around ten thirty this morning I once more crossed an imaginary line in my mind and find that I have now listened to 119,000 unique iTunes ‘songs’.* The 119,000th track was a fairly pedestrian effort by Glenn Miller’s band, with vocals by Ray Eberle, “And the Angels Sing”. It was on a Reader’s Digest compilation …

Friday Vocabulary

1. adumbrate — to outline; to foreshadow; to faintly indicate; to overshadow, to partially conceal Whereas some biographies illuminate their subjects, Mr. Parker’s paean to the late colonel merely adumbrates what should have been an interesting figure.   2. beck — [North England] swift running brook He knelt alongside the beck and read her letter …

Friday Vocabulary

1. scarehead — newspaper headline printed in huge type As the scareheads of every European daily proclaimed the approach to the very brink of war, events in this tiny Balkan town conspired to slow the fevered sale of the screaming newspapers.   2. saltatory — characterized by or adapted for leaping or dancing movement Suddenly …

Friday Vocabulary

1. sesquipedalian — long-winded, given to using big words; polysyllabic I finally was able to decipher the doctor’s obfuscatory and sesquipedalian oration and learned that my car had been stolen.   2. plexus — network of nerves or blood vessels; web-like structure of networked complexity Somehow over the years this one small block of the …