Words I had to look up when re-reading “Lolita”

So many of them. Pretty shameful; I think I used to be smarter.  My only solace is that often my Kindle didn’t know them either.

(Also, I’m not original, someone else did the same thing.)

1. Cognomen: surname.
2. Etiolate: to cause (a plant) to whiten or grow pale by excluding light…to cause to become weakened or sickly; drain of color or vigor.
3. Paleopedology:  branch of soil science (pedology) dealing with past geologic ages.
4. Uranist: homosexual.
5. Phocine: related to or resembling a seal.
6. Nates: buttocks.
7. Nacreous: resembling mother-of-pearl. (I think I used to know that.)
8. Iliac: related to the ilium (the uppermost and widest of the three sections of the hipbone).
9. Charshaf: veil worn by Turkish women.
10. Incondite: unpolished, crude, rough.
11. Incarnadine: blood-red or pink.
12. Eructations: belching or otherwise violent eruptions.
13. Vermeil: vermilion red or gilded metal.
14. Congeneric: from same genus or offering a group of closely related services.
15. Alembic: vessel with beaked cap or head, formerly used in distilling or anything that transforms or purifies.
16. Lentigo: freckle or pigmented spot.
17. Plumbaceous: lead-colored.
18. Shoat: young, weaned pig.
19. Callypygean/callipygian: having shapely buttocks.
20. Clathrate: resembling a lattice; divided or marked like latticework.
21. Trochaic: related to trochee (a foot of two syllables, a long followed by a short in quantitative meter, or a stressed followed by an unstressed in accentual meter).
22. Coevals: contemporaries. (I pretty much knew that.)
23. Samara: an indehiscent, usually one-seeded, winged fruit, as of the elm or maple.
24. Adumbrate: to outline or sketch; to foreshadow;  to darken or conceal; overshadow. (Sorta knew that.)
25. Teleology:  the belief that purpose and design are a part of or are apparent in nature.
26. Festoons: a decorative representation of a string or chain of flowers, foliage, ribbon, etc., suspended in a curve between two points., as in architectural work or on pottery.
27. Viatic: Of or pertaining to a journey or traveling.
28. Concupiscence: lust or longing.
29. Matitudinal: occurring in the morning.
30. Leporine: of, pertaining to, or resembling a rabbit or hare.
31. Rill: small rivulet or brook.
32. Crepitate: to make a crackling sound.
33. Talus: the uppermost bone of the proximal row of bones of the tarsus; anklebone.
34. Ballade: a poem consisting commonly of three stanzas having an identical rhyme scheme, followed by an envoy, and having the same last line for each of the stanzas and the envoy.
35. Syncope: Grammar . the contraction of a word by omitting one or more sounds from the middle, as in the reduction of never  to ne'er. Pathology . brief loss of consciousness associated with transient cerebral anemia, as in heart block, sudden lowering of the blood pressure, etc.; fainting.
36. Mordant: a substance used in dyeing to fix the coloring matter, especially a metallic compound, as an oxide or hydroxide, that combines with the organic dye and forms an insoluble colored compound or lake in the fiber.
37. Maquette: a small model or study in three dimensions for either a sculptural or an architectural project.
38. Spoor: a track or trail, especially that of a wild animal pursued as game.
39. Logodaedaly: Verbal legerdemain; a playing with words.
40. Logomancy: divination by words.
41. Undinist: one who is sexually aroused by water, esp urination.
42. Recondite: little known, obscure.
43. Valetudinarian: invalid or person excessively concerned about ailments.
44. Hypnotoid: like or resembling the hypnotic state.
45. Purblind: nearly blind or dim-sighted.
46. Selenian: a. lunar. selenic, a. like the moon; containing selenium. selenite, n. dweller on moon;
47. kind of gypsum. selenitic, a. pertaining to or affected by moon.
48. Flavid: yellow.
49. Aurochs: the ancestor of domestic cattle, was a type of large wild cattle which inhabited Europe, Asia and North Africa, but which is now extinct; it survived in Europe until the last recorded aurochs, a female, died in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland in 1627. Her skull is now the property of the Livrustkammaren ("Royal Armory") museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

 And some bits I liked...

“If some cafe sign proclaimed ‘IceCold Drinks,’ she was automatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice-cold.  She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.”

“Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, ‘too prehistoric for words’ (blasè Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot.”

“Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced, blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing mountain of dusty old-fashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain that would have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by now), nothing to show but the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero embracing his gorgeous frontier bride.”

“I prided myself on the exact temperature of my relations with them: never rude, always aloof. My west-door neighbor, who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don’t mind if these verbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just sufficiently articulate to sound like conventional assents or interrogative pause-fillers, precluded any evolution toward chumminess.”

“Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?”

“We are men of the world, in everything – sex, free verse, marksmanship.”