Since I am rereading the first nine Master and Commanders I am trying to take down and look up words I don't know. Here is today's list. If you already knew them, please tell me. David.....David, I'm looking at you here. Mom, you too.
Rodomontade.
Farinaceous.
Widdershins.
Parturient.
Atrip.
Mooncalves.
Enemata. (of course. now i see.)
Fascines.
Tormina.
Roborative.
Paturient and Tormina were kind of easy to guess at. I didn't get Enemata. I guess my brain isn't programmed like that. But I know someone's whose is, and I am programmed to kill him on sight. Read these books!
If I haven't convinced you to read these books yet, here is an excerpt from HMS Surprise pg. 265 in the Harper Collins edition:
'It is clear you have been a great while at sea, to call those sandy-haired coarse-featured pimply short-necked thick-fingered vulgar-minded lubricious blockheads by such a name. Nymphs, forsooth. If they were nymphs, they must have had their being in a tolerably rank and stagnant pool: the wench on my left had an ill breath, and turning for relief I found her sister had worse; and the upper garment of neither was free from reproach. Worse lay below, I make no doubt. "La, sister," cries the one to the other, breathing across me- vile teeth; and "La, sister," cries the other. I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting meretricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal foreheads; it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously acquired. And when I think that their teeming loins will people the East...'
2 comments:
Knew less than half, though mooncalf is one of my favorite Shakespearean insults (see The Tempest)
Would do better seeing them in context. Afraid you've lost me on these. I feel like I'm slipping!
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