One Hundred and Seventeen Songs (117,000)

More than two hundred days after my last thousand songs were heard, I have just listened to my 117,000th unique iTunes track, a somewhat mediocre though I suppose historically interesting rendition of the Wilson Pickett classic “In The Midnight Hour” by a group of rock legends jamming at a Taj Mahal concert in Hollywood in 1987. Although Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and John Fogerty are on stage, you hear mostly Taj Mahal singing in this cut. The mix is bad, but I’ve heard worse.

The Stats

117,000 unique tracks takes up 773.26 GB (↑ 6.65 GB), which would take 510 days, 6 hours, 25 minutes, and 31 seconds to listen to altogether (↑ 3 days and 4-1/4 hours). Remaining unplayed in my iTunes library of files are 77,246 tracks, 1,463 more than my last report (meaning almost 2,500 tracks have been added to my library since I hit 116,000 songs heard—which I suppose is what happens when you get a lot of CDs for Xmas). The unplayed files occupy 527.93 GB of data space (↑ 16.75 GB) and 264 days, 6 hours, 55 minutes and 14 seconds of time (↑ 3 days & 21 hours). This last thousand songs saw fall even further the decline in total time ‘consumed’ by my tracks heard, as the significant change in my consumptive habits continues; put simply, I now listen to my iTunes almost exclusively on the way to and from work, and only occasionally am listening to the radio shows which a year ago made up at least a plurality of the tracks I heard. (Part of the difference, however, is due as well to the fact that I made several mix CDs for some persons last year, which—in the backassward way in which I construct them—necessitates listening over and over to the same tracks in varying order.)

To reach the 117,000th unique track, I listened to 1,556 songs since track #116,000, starting this latest tranche with an unreleased Hank Williams song from his radio days, “Cherokee Boogie”. These 1,556 songs occupy 9.67 GB of data, and 4 days, 14 hours, and 37 minutes of time. Thus over a third of the songs listened to had been heard previously, due as I’ve alluded to before to the change in my listening habits caused by my new work situation starting in May of 2020.

It took 209 days to listen to the last thousand songs, meaning just under 4.8 new songs per day were heard.

4.8 New Tracks Heard per Day

If we include the previously heard songs, we find that I heard 7.4 tracks per day, a drastic drop of about six songs fewer per day than the last set of one thousand songs, which itself was an even greater drop from the previous thousand to that. This is due to the aforementioned change in my job situation, and the CD making, the latter of which means that I listened to some of those previously heard songs many, many times during this last nine months. I expect both these numbers to go up in the next report.

7.4 Tracks Heard per Day

I make no promise this time of further analysis of these songs, and may just attempt to wait until I have hit a nice even number, if I can do that before new technology renders this whole exercise pointless and irretrievable. (I append here my previous note on the same.)

 

(Previous note)

I am also beginning to wonder if my analysis of my listened-to songs will survive the transition to a new MacOS and its ‘updated’ Music software (or are we supposed to call it an ‘app’ now?). Usually I would go into an Apple store and poke around in it, but I guess I’ll just have to write a blog post about it, though I fear the inevitable responses about going to Windows (or Linux, from the weirdos)—which I suppose would be better than the actual response, which is to say, none at all. Besides, I have to write up my history of why it took me five days to set up my wife’s new iPhone, and before that I really do owe Bill an explanation of why I asked for a handful of Lego pieces for Christmas a few years back. *Sigh* Maybe next time I have to do taxes I’ll procrastinate in such a way. Until then …

… that’s all folks. See you next time!

Friday Vocabulary

1. targe — [archaic] buckler, small shield

Any doubts I had about the value of Kenwyth’s targe were erased when I saw the bowman knock two skirmishers to the ground with the small shield, with hardly a pause in his shooting.

 

2. heriot — feudal tribute of equipment or chattel

The young knight, to replace the steed lost through his own poor judgment, boldly claimed as heriot the best horse of William’s herd.

 

3. dooly — rude litter used in India

We rigged up a dooly from the bedclothes and some broomsticks and carried the colonel out the back window of the cabin upon it.

 

4. endore — to make a bright golden color in cooking

A mixture of egg yolks and butter is spread over the outer pastry to endore it just before placing it into the oven.

 

5. nathemore — [archaic] nevermore

But Sir Patrick will return from across that darksome sea nathemore.

 

6. tufa — limestone formed from calcareous deposits from springs or lakes

Many fossils have been found in porous tufa, which is generally so friable as to make excavation of the relics quite easy.

 

7. soutane — cassock of Roman Catholic clergy

Father Xavier shut the aumbry and began to unbutton his soutane, his thoughts still upon what the friar had told him the evening before.

 

8. wattle — fleshy lobe hanging down from neck or head of certain fowl

Even though he had been warned, even though he had been strictly forbidden, Preston could not keep his eyes of the matron’s infamous wattle, which shook and shuddered all the more as she realized that he was focusing upon her least favorite feature.

 

9. deodand — item or animal that caused a human death and that was then forfeited to the Crown for pious use; sum of money in lieu of such item or animal

The second time she painfully stubbed her toe upon my old war souvenir (this time causing a fracture, as the doctor informed us later), I offered to rid our home of the heavy brass trophy, donating it to Goodwill as a deodand, but she wouldn’t hear of it, saying that anything I had managed to carry across country not once but three times must have some value, at least to me.

 

10. minimus — creature of the smallest size; fifth digit, little finger or toe

The toe that was broken, as we learned later, was the minimus.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Scots)

gillie — guide for hunting or fishing

You may chafe under the strict instructions of the gillie, but remember that he knows the fish of these lakes—and their favorite lures—a fair sight better than you ever will.

Monday Book Report: The Real Middle Earth

I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept.

The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages, by Brian Bates

Though this book is a muddled cornucopia of flaccid ideas masquerading as history, anthropology, mythology, psychology, and spirituality, I am not going to spend much time outlining just why this book is incompetent and just what are the many mistakes its author makes; that task has been done much better than I ever could have done by a user named Jan-Maat on the Goodreads site, and you can find his review here. I wanted instead to only quickly eviscerate this tome by quoting a few passages and by bemoaning the academic standards of a world in which the University of Brighton gives the author of The Real Middle Earth a professorship and a world where such a man can teach “an award-winning course in Shamanic Consciousness”. Mr. Bates’s predilection for finding a fictive enchantment in an imagined past is only compounded by his penchant for a double mis-naming/mis-interpretation as he tries to rebrand the Medieval period as “the real Middle Earth” and as he tries to shoehorn Tolkien into every aspect of Celtic/Norse/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Pagan life as seen though eyes which insist on magic at the expense of toe-stubbing reality. About a quarter of the book are passages wherein he seeks to wax rhapsodic over places he visited in preparation for this book—reconstructed houses at West Stow, mounds where the Sutton Hoo treasure was found, an ancient (perhaps the ancient) yew tree near Runnymede—but his gift for poetry is no better than his poor camera work featured in a color section in the center of the book. The Real Middle Earth is a frustrating bungle of a book, but—and it is a big ‘but’—it has a very interesting bibliography.

All around me elder and sweetbriar shrubs flaunted petals in colors softened by the filtered sunlight. I breathe their sweet fragrance warmed and wafted by the summer breeze. Chaffinches flitted nervously from bush to bush, chattering to each other in harsh warning notes as I passed. When today we glimpse the breathtaking beauty of a woodland setting, it is hardly surprising to us that the people of the historical Middle-earth imbued nature with a spiritual presence. But, of course, for them it was far more than a matter of aesthetic beauty. Landscapes are taken in by the eye but actually perceived with the brain. That is where interpretation and meaning make sense of the signals from our sensory receptors. And they saw more than we would, gazing at the same scene. They thought of nature not only as an objective world, external to themselves, but as also reaching internally, with magical powers and imbued with the full richness of their imagination. Features of nature had many layers of meaning, levels of significance, allusions and messages. The forest was alive with the chatter of another world.

Oh! To be in England!
Well, maybe…
Bates gives no more evidence for the conclusions he draws in this paragraph than his bald assertion. So … maybe so … maybe not

As I say, if you have this book in your library, I highly recommend that you read the books in his bibliography—most of them, at least—and skip his nearly random musings altogether. Mr. Bates uses the sources sparingly, without footnotes and with only the lightest of citing in text, but has little hesitation in using another author’s book as a reason for the most speculative conclusions about a culture and a place and a time far divorced from the source he pleads to. Thus he will cite Tacitus on the German tribes to make assertions about practices in Britain over half a millennium later, references studies of Siberian and South American shamans of the current day to draw conclusions about magic beliefs in his ‘Middle-earth’, and never uses a footnote so that you can check up on his intellectual honesty. In the case of those cited sources which I had already read, I saw that the conclusion of Mr. Bates were often quite a long way distant from those of the original book, and in some cases seem to be almost diametrically opposed. In all cases, the Celts, the Norse, the Germans, the Goths, all the pre-Christian and non-Roman peoples are all good, and the Romans, and the rising Christian polities which followed them, are bad. Mostly.

The Romans are counterpointed elsewhere in this book as lacking some of the imaginative sensitivities of Middle-earth culture. However, they also honored wells.

At least there’s that, then

“Middle-earth culture” becomes a catch-all for all the good stuff, and Rome and Christians become the bad guys, trying to destroy those wonderful, primitive people with their closer attunement to the true wonder of nature. And maybe it’s so, but this book doesn’t make a case for this assertion; it only makes the case that the author would like very much for this to be so. Mr. Bates plays fast and loose with everything he says or mentions, as when he speaks of the “more intimate perspective on animals” of the “indigenous people of Middle-earth”—which completely ignores the fact that the ‘people’ he is discussing (though we cannot quite pin him down) were engaged in pushing out the previous occupants in almost every land, and certainly in the British Isles this is so, where the Picts, Irish, Scots, Angles, Danes, and who-knows-who-else were all violently taking over and kicking out each other in a continual struggle all through the first millennium of the Common Era.

One of the rides on [Odin’s eight-legged horse] Sleipnir was taken by the god Hermothr, whom some scholars think to be an alter ego of Odin. I shall therefore refer to Sleipnir’s rider here directly as Odin.

Whereupon Bates then relates the account of the ride to the Underworld by Hermothr. Who was Odin’s son. The sources mentioned in the notes to the chapter where this passage is found do not, unsurprisingly, have anything to say about this Hermothr/Odin confusion.

Some of the works, particularly the more recent books, which he cites are a little bit credulous, I think, but they seem to play fair with their readers, unlike The Real Middle Earth. Not content to cite text from 1st Century Romans to bolster accounts of British practices from the latter half of the first millennium, Bates has no compunction against stating such breathtaking absurdities as “an account from thirteenth-century Denmark provides a glimpse of what probably went on in similar form all over Middle-earth”, then citing an erotic dance with an Ox as evidence for the power of women in his imagined British world. This isn’t evidence, it is wishful thinking. One can forgive some simple mistakes in a work such as this—as, for example, when he cites The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic by R. Merrifield as “…of Religion and Magic“—but those are honest mistakes. However, as the annoying insistence on speaking of “Middle-earth” when talking about Medieval Britain shows, Mr. Bates is not a historian, nor an anthropologist, not even close. The level of insight into this long ago time never rises above that one might expect from an episode of What’s New, Scooby-Doo? At least the latter would be brief and to the point.

Friday Vocabulary

1. perfuse — to besprinkle, to overspread (as with moisture or color); to pour through or over, to diffuse through; [medicine] to circulate through blood vessels or lymphatic system

Cunegonde’s cheeks were perfused with a rosy glow, though whether from joy or from our strenuous exertions I could not tell.

 

2. volplane — to fly downward in an airplane with the motor off

Just before we crested the hill, Jerome cut off the engine and we volplaned down just above tree level in a sudden rushing silence towards the compound where the lovely Clarissa was being held.

 

3. hobby — [archaic] small horse or pony

He rode upon an Irish hobby as short and stout as himself, and rider and beast made an amusing spectacle for the village children as the two wobbled up to the abbey’s gates.

 

4. scutage — fees paid in lieu of military service to a feudal lord

King John’s unilateral increase of scutage by fifty percent was among the ‘insults’ to the barons which led to the imposition of the Magna Carta.

 

5. fadge — [obsolete] to fit, to be suitable; to put up with

The miller’s absence did so fadge with Hiram’s nefarious purpose that he immediately began to importune the miller’s daughter.

 

6. scathe — harm, injury

“You do me great scathe to ask me once more if I shall fulfill my promises.”

 

7. isogonic — having equal angles; esp., of lines demarcating points having equal magnetic declination

Pilots habituated to GPS may have difficulty adjusting to flying by compass, as they often have forgotten just what those isogonic lines on the navigation maps mean.

 

8. trichotomy — division into three

The most famous trichotomy is that of Gaul in Caesar’s immortal opening lines of De Bello Gallico.

 

9. anastomosis — opening between spaces not usually connected

Many nosebleeds originate in Kiesselbach’s plexus, an anastomosis of five arteries in the nasal septum.

 

10. buhl (or Buhl) — brass, pewter, tortoiseshell, etc. inlaid as decoration

Not being a fan of rococo I had initially disdained as overwrought the decorated bed but, as I looked more closely at the buhl work upon the headboard I could not help but be impressed by the sumptuousness of the intricate marquetry.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(legal Latin)

sub judice — under judicial consideration

In England contempt of court rules include strict prohibitions against reporting by journalists on many sub judice matters.

Friday Vocabulary

1. po-faced — [British] humorless, over-serious, disapproving

Alain’s attempts at defusing the tense standoff between the two culinary students only elicited a po-faced shake of the head from Chef Arnie.

 

2. auscultation — diagnosis through listening to bodily sounds, usually with a stethoscope

Though the pulse diagnosis of Chinese medicine has been compared with the Western practice of auscultation, due in part to the significant training required to acquire either skill, the fact remains that pulse assessment remains unreliable and highly subjective in contradistinction to use of the stethoscope.

 

3. rede — counsel, advice

I thank you sincerely for your rede, even though I shall now proceed to ignore it.

 

4. lipophilic — having strong affinity for fats or lipids

The lipophilic nature of cannabinoids was doubtless the reason this doctor wished to cut out a chunk of my ass.

 

5. miniver — white fur lining or trim

But her straitened situation was betrayed by the miniver lining the long sleeves of her best velvet surcote, which an observant eye could note had become worn from many repairs and washings.

 

6. drag hunt — equestrian hunting in which hounds follow an artificial scent lain along a predetermined trail

Jemma is still puzzled as to why these activists are protesting so vociferously against drag hunts.

 

7. piscina — basin with drain used for ablutions, particularly for washing communion vessels

After quickly though reverently rinsing the vessels in the piscina Father Xavier placed them back in the aumbry.

 

8. yarak — (of a hawk) in prime condition for hunting

It will take some not so little work of imping before your favorite is returned to yarak, milord.

 

9. transude — to ooze through

The Deadheads transuded past security like sweat through a tie-dye bandana.

 

10. cittern — wire-string instrument similar to guitar, having a flat pear-shaped soundbox and asymmetric neck

Like some jongleurs in the Tyrol he played his cittern using a plectrum.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British or Pennsylvanian dialect)

nebby — meddlesome, nosy

“You’re not listening to every tale that nebby old broad has been telling you, have you?”

Monday Book Report: Sir Nigel

Sir Nigel, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Almost all readers know that Arthur Conan Doyle created the immortal Sherlock Holmes, the seminal precursor to all the idiosyncratic detectives which have since become a welcome (mostly) plague upon all our houses and libraries. And those readers more familiar with the creator of the duo of Holmes and Watson are usually aware that Doyle was not entirely enamored of his creation. But few know Doyle also wrote historical fiction, which he always believed was his most outstanding work, and fewer still read those works which shall never be part of ‘the canon’ of Sherlock fans on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. I, myself, only accidentally stumbled upon one of Sir Arthur’s other brilliant protagonists—the dashing and quite clueless Brigadier Gerard—which had been misfiled in the ‘Mystery’ aisle of a used bookstore. But I had never read either of his medieval novels before, and now can well understand why Arthur Conan Doyle thought them his worthiest creations; Sir Nigel is wonderful.

Springing to right and swooping to left, now with its tangled wicked head betwixt its fore-feet, and now pawing eight feet high in the air, with scarlet, furious nostrils and maddened eyes, the yellow horse was a thing of terror and of beauty. But the lithe figure on his back, bending like a reed in the wind to every movement, firm below, pliant above, with calm inexorable face, and eyes which danced and gleamed with the joy of contest, still held its masterful place for all that the fiery heart and the iron muscles of the great beast could do.

A boy and his horse.

Doyle’s novel, written in 1906, is actually a belated prequel to his earlier tale of the XIVth Century, The White Company, written fifteen years earlier. Where the latter book features as hero Sir Nigel Loring as the wise master of many battles and combats, our book Sir Nigel follows the same protagonist from his earliest days upon a failing manor estate in the south of England through his initial successes upon the path of chivalry. It is a delightful picaresque full of incident and interest. The author’s ear for dialogue and description never fail him, and the extensive research he made into the period of the Hundred Years’ War manifests itself upon every page. Best of all, the novel is overfull of that delight for writing and words which Arthur Conan Doyle evinced in those initial stories of the Sherlock Holmes tales (I exempt A Study In Scarlet, which drags).

There he had gone first to the goldsmith and had bought back cup and salver and bracelet, mourning with the merchant over the evil chance that gold and gold-work had for certain reasons which only those in the trade could fully understand gone up in value during the last week, so that already fifty gold pieces had to be paid more than the price which Nigel had received. In vain the faithful Aylward fretted and fumed and muttered a prayer that the day would come when he might feather a shaft in the merchant’s portly paunch. The money had to be paid.

Doyle deigns to indulge in some delightful irony

Of course, the tale is not for everyone. Many will thrown by Doyle’s imperial viewpoint of England and her old nobility, and the English author was definitely a man of his time. No less than Kipling did Sir Arthur support the dominion of the United Kingdom. But of more concern to some readers may be his forthright treatment of violence and the brutality of the age of which he writes. Though knights may be spared for ransom, all lesser combatants would be slain upon the field after battle, as Doyle is at pains to relate. The fierce savagery of the fighting is also honestly told, viewed though it often is through the eyes of young Nigel Loring, who sees in terms of a chivalric vision which was already out of date during the period related here. But the ferocity only serves to underline the splendor of both the prose and the bygone world it tells.

A fearsome sight was Pommers that day, his red eyes rolling, his nostrils gaping, his tawny mane tossing, and his savage teeth gnashing in fury, as he tore and smashed and ground beneath his ramping hoofs all that came before him. Fearsome too was the rider, ice-cool, alert, concentrated of purpose, with heart of fire and muscles of steel. A very angel of battle he seemed as he drove his maddened horse through the thickest of the press

A young man and his horse

I look forward to reading the earlier sequel, The White Company, to learn more of the success of Sir Nigel. The book under consideration is his origin story, and is more of a succession of episodes than any complex plotted tale. (This, in fact, is Doyle’s strong suit, as the success of the Holmes’s short stories over most of the novels (excepting The Hound of the Baskervilles) proves.) As my label of ‘picaresque’ is meant to imply, Nigel at the close is very much the same as Nigel in the beginning. But he is a thrilling and compelling character, full of passion for right and action, bravery and derring-do. Those who enjoyed the tales of King Arthur, or such romances, will find this a wonderful read.

Friday Vocabulary

1. otic — of the ear

Despite the advocates’ claims, ear candles are ineffective and dangerous, and could result in hot wax falling into the otic canal.

 

2. refrangible — capable of being refracted

Though red light was known even in the time of Newton to be the least refrangible of the visible spectrum, not until the Twentieth Century was it understood why this light affected photographic plates least.

 

3. normal — at right angle, perpendicular

Large billboards will be weakest to forces, such as high winds, normal to their surface.

 

4. hematopoietic — of the formation of blood

One of the sicker ideas of fifty years ago was to study hematopoietic diseases through the use of neomorts.

 

5. sarky — [British] sarcastic

He was a sarky character who always had something negative to say about everyone, but was so thin-skinned that the slightest comment about his appearance or attitude could send him home in a pout.

 

6. wideawake — black or brown felt hat with wide brim and lowish crown, Quaker hat

Distracted by Jim’s shabby old wideawake, I only now noticed the fervent almost fanatic eyes of hypnotic blue which stared out at me from beneath the crushed brown felt.

 

7. nichrome — alloy of nickel and chromium

Because of its high electrical resistance, nichrome wire is still commonly used in toasters and hair dryers.

 

8. eremite — anchoret, religious hermit or recluse

Pity the poor modern born to be an eremite but continually bombarded by advertisements and noise and distraction, who—unless wealthy enough to pay for retreats at Sedona or whichever hip ‘spiritual’ vacation spot—may best find peace and quiet in a double-wide parked off the side of a lonely road in southern New Mexico, though even that is getting crowded.

 

9. cenotaph — tomb or sepulchral monument for person whose body lies elsewhere

So beloved was the hero that four cemeteries across the tiny mountain nation boasted a cenotaph to his memory, though of course his body was never recovered after the explosion.

 

10. overmorrow — [archaic] on the day after tomorrow

I am a true procrastinator and will never even plan for tomorrow what might be better done overmorrow.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(American slang)

spondulics (also spondulix or spondulicks)— spending money

Sure, I looked fine in my new clothes and slick hair, but without spondulics I would not have even a ghost of a chance to woo the lovely Muriel.

600 Books

Just this morning (early in the AM) I finished reading the 600th book since beginning to track such things way back in the middle of 2015. Now you can see, perhaps, just why I was so anxious to get the analysis of the previous hundred books out the door; I knew that the next hundred was almost ready to come out of the oven, so to speak, and I needed the space on the countertops.

Though the vast majority of the past hundred books seems to me to have been genre fiction (this is my impression at the moment, knee-jerk though it is, and subject to revision when I finally get around to an actual review of the data), the book which pushed me over the imaginary marker was a short history text, the most wonderful and excellent précis The Barbarian West: The Early Middle Ages A.D. 400–1000, by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill. This very well-written survey of the sometimes murky period between the final collapse of the imperial power of Rome and the rise of the West is full of insights by a true master of his material. Though not a little of his tight prose is devoted to underlining just how limited must be our absolute conclusions concerning many details of the events he discusses, Mr. Wallace-Hadrill provides an almost breathtaking appraisal of the sweeping movements of peoples, trade, and ideas which cross the Western European stage in near dizzying succession during this turbulent age. Likely as not his ideas have been corrected or at least revised in the nearly seventy years since this book was written (suggestions, anyone?), but it is hard for me to believe that anyone has succeeded in bettering his prose. Top marks.

Now I have to confess that I had been trying to read as fast as possible since completing my last hundred books* back on September 12 of 2020. In fact, I had hoped to read the next hundred books in only a hundred days, which would have been December 21st, but I either could not maintain this pace while also doing a silly NaNoWriMo project or could not constrain myself to read only the shortest and easiest books available—though when I promulgate the full list you shall see that I read plenty of (extremely) quick reads over the past set of books. Today’s milestone means that 112 days have passed since I began the last tranche, which gives a ridiculously fast pace of 1.12 days per book read. Although I am tempted to remind you of the earlier reading pace statistics, I feel as if I’ve done that only a few days ago (which I did), and so I’ll save further details for whatever analysis I end up getting around to about these last hundred books.

   1 Book per 1.12 Days   

One thing I am certain of, however, is that I will not sustain anything like this bookish celerity in the next slice of a hundred books. (Is it peculiar that every time I write “a hundred” some recess of my brain, doubtless affected (in both senses) by too much BBC television, wishes to type “an hundred”?) No, I have decided to forego speed for a more usual reading style, though I am still training one foci of my literary ellipse upon those books which I suspect I may not wish to keep any longer in my library. (One statistic I neglected to mention in my last report was that nearly a quarter of the books read ended up in my ‘To Go Away’ pile; which reminds me, if anyone wants some discards, including some truly wretched so-called ‘self-help’ books, let me know.) The pace I set also meant that I forewent (I joke) my sometime book reviews or rather book reports that I have foisted upon y’all now and then, though I did feel compelled just last week to write that one about the wonderful and the horrible wacko books I read at the end of this set of a hundred. Perhaps I’ll now have both more time and more inclination to tell you a little something about the silly, silly books I still insist on reading all the way through once I pick them from off of my shelves, even if I decide after reading that they shall never darken those shelves again. We shall see.

Until then, and until the full listing of these last hundred books, as well as the analysis of the same, I wish all of you very well. I hope that everyone of you—and many more besides!—will have a very, very good New Year!

*As usual, I exclude those books within my ‘Comics & Graphic Novels’ genre from my calculations.

Friday Vocabulary

1. irenic — non-polemic, pacifying, tending to promote reconciliation

Strangely enough for one of his vociferous views, at the dinner table his presence seemed to have an irenic effect upon the recriminations and attacks of our usual Thanksgiving meals.

 

2. gyp — servant for students at Cambridge and Durham colleges

So here was the great Lord Weddington, M.A. (Cantab.), regaling us with stories of the egregious pranks he and his fellow students had played upon their old gyp, including one rather repulsive tale involving a muddy pair of boots and a pregnant rodent.

 

3. hierophant — expounder of sacred mysteries or esoteric principles

While in ancient Greece only a venerated person of great knowledge could attain the rank, the current ‘see for yourself’ principle of much muddled conspiracy thinking makes of every weirdo with a WiFi the sagest hierophant for the latest revelations of the secret forces behind every seemingly (and actually) prosaic event.

 

4. boustrophedon — moving alternately from right to left and from left to right, as in certain ancient texts and inscriptions

He shuffled boustrophedon through the aisles of the theater, picking up discarded candy wrappers and popcorn boxes left behind by the patrons who so recently had watched the latest retconning of the Star Wars saga.

 

5. eschar — dark crusty dead tissue, as a scab or resulting from a burn

Debridement of eschar may provide relief if the burns result in external pressure.

 

6. dysphemism — derogatory or socially taboo expression

Apparently, calling white trash a bunch of ignorant crackers is now supposed to be some sort of dysphemism.

 

7. supermalagorgeous — [slang] terrific

“Oh, mother! Why can’t you see how supermalagorgeous Johnny is and why do you have to ask where he gets his money from?!?”.

 

8. blain — blister, pustule, inflammatory swelling

The boils and blains which tormented him were nothing compared with the buboes his brother had just barely survived.

 

9. cloche — glass cover placed over plants; bell-shaped cover for plates of food; close-fitting brimmed woman’s hat

The intricately carved Christmas ornament shaped like a dinosaur was displayed beneath a heavy glass cloche, and thus escaped the dust which lay upon every other item in the room.

 

10. rive — to tear apart; to cleave

The sad news rived my heart and left me shaken.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(fashion)

Hessian boot — knee-high tasseled riding boot

Marley looked beautifully military from his Hessian boots to his glorious ermine-trimmed pelisse, the gold cord on his shoulder mirroring the tassels below his knees.