Occasionally, I post new-to-me words discovered during my reading rambles. I do this for my edification. If you’ve stumbled across this post and you're a word-nerd, you might enjoy these as well. Following each word is a short definition (sometimes with a thought interjected parenthetically) trailed by the context in which the word was found.
arrant: without qualification; used informally as (often pejorative) intensifiers
“And he believed that time advanced at a smooth and constant rate from past to future. "Absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external," Newton declared at the beginning of his Principia-Ta those caught up in the temporal flux of daily life, this seems like arrant nonsense.”
— When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, Jim Holt
anlage: an organ in its earliest stage of development; the foundation for subsequent development
“I sometimes wonder if those people who make the best artists, or indeed artists regardless of worth, are not those for whom childhood remains overwhelmingly vivid. Although this appears at first glance to suffer from the fallacies of nostalgia and oversimplification, I can account in no other way for the extraordinarily compelling urge toward the unity of simplicity that appears to underlie the artist's anlage toward universal understanding.”
— Always Reaching, Anne Truitt
chthonic: dwelling beneath the surface of the earth
“But if the dangers of the chthonic are real, it is also the chthonic in which vital immediacy is embedded.”
— The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin
"The rite of meditation was followed by a communal rite of sulphurous fire, which related to "the chthonic character of the mythical reality" the group was seeking, Repeated "every month on the night of the new moon", these rites were accompanied by a radical change in the adept's way of life."
— Georges Bataille, The Sacred Conspiracy
psittacosis: an atypical pneumonia caused by arickettsia microorganism and transmitted to humans from infected birds
“That is how words, instead of being mechanically (psittacismically) arranged, take on color and weight (acquire the granite density and warm hues that at that time I particularly wished they would have, and quit following one another around in dull, parrot-like chatter); they move me (touch me and spur me on as ardent and tender words that culminate in a discernible point inside me) and no longer count for me as words (become something other than lifeless tools).”
— The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat, Michel Leiris