John Vaillant's excellent book, Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World, is one of the best-written things I've read all year. The content itself is fascinating and relevant (the week I read it, my town was under consecutive extreme heat warnings) -- so you should check it for those reasons alone. But the writing is fantastic, too. Part of what makes it so solid is some of the vocab -- and I don't even mean technical and scientific terms. Here are some of the words that caught my eye (all definitions from Merriam-Webster, except as noted):
- discontinuity: a situation wherein expertise and past experience cease to be useful guides to future problem-solving (Vaillant)
- gnomon: an object that by the position or length of its shadow serves as an indicator especially of the hour of the day: such as a sundial
- ignescent: volatile
- infandous: unspeakable, too odious to be spoken (the OED considers this term obsolete, but here's JV using it in 2023!)
- Lucretius Problem: the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience (Vaillant)
- plangent: having a loud reverberating sound or an expressive and especially plaintive quality
- predatory delay: the deliberate slowing of change to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo whose costs will be paid by others (Vaillant)
- revirescent: growing fresh or young again, reviving
- viriditas: greenness (Wikipedia)
Infandous is my favorite and a friend of mine and I have committed to bringing it back. And I'm definitely using revirescent and viridtas in my nature writing.
PRO TIP: I keep a reading journal -- a notebook where I jot cool words like these, copy down passages that speak to me or process my thoughts about the text (quality and concept). It's a great way to enhance the experience of a book -- especially if it's on loan from the library or a friend. Mine wouldn't be of much use to anyone but me because my handwriting is terrible, but I love going back through and revisiting what I've read.
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The post Word nerd alert! New (to me) vocab first appeared on The Word Factory.