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.
cerebration: the process of using your mind to consider something carefully. | “All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.” Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
quadripartite: consisting of four parts. | “Meanwhile, there was still no theme for the quadripartite profile.” | John McPhee, in Draft No. 4, explaining his process for interviewing and sketching a biographical essay about four different people.
volute: A structure consisting of something wound in a continuous series of loops. | “This carries the image to the point of exaggeration no reasonable mind would care to maintain. But exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image. And to add fantasy linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute of words, of all the superabundant blessings that life folded in piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.” - The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
alembic: an obsolete kind of container used for distillation | “Try, my Friend, to take stock of what you have become, be a little curious to know your new heart, and to use it as it comes out of the alembic of the innumerable metamorphosis.” - Letters to Merline, Rilke
ekstasis: Standing outside oneself. | “This is not just a moment of revealed existence: It is a spiritual event. Sappho enters into ecstasy, ‘Greener than grass I am …,’ she says, predicating of her own Being an attribute called ekstasis, literally ‘standing outside oneself,’ a condition regarded by the Greeks as typical of mad persons, geniuses and lovers, and ascribed to poets by Aristotle. - Anne Carson, “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God”