Occasionally, I post new-to-me words discovered via my reading rambles. I do this for my edification. If you happened to stumble across this post and you are a word nerd, you might enjoy discovering 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.
- comport: behave well or properly | "He found it difficult to comport himself so that nothing in his expression, posture, or voice would reveal his peculiar fate or depression or illness to the young man, who was undoubtedly observing him closely." - Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
- fulgurous: amazingly impressive; suggestive of the flashing of lightening | "It took me some time to understand that the author of the Tropics never intended images to illuminate a subject; he used the subject to spawn a whole new generation of images. Language grows freely, swelling and foaming from ceaseless fulguration" - Brassaï, Henry Miller, The Paris Years
- defenestration: the act of throwing someone or something out of a window | "The windows of Prague send a shiver down your spine; it is the capital of defenestrations. You look toward the long windows and see how they fall, killing themselves on the long and glistening stones of the Mala Strana and the Czernin Palace - the Hussite reformers and communists who have yet to find their century." - Carlos Fuentes, "The Other K," from Myself and Others
- eudaemonic: producing happiness and well-being | "The eudaemonic approach draws on the Aristotelian concept of the good life, and appeals to the widely shared intuition that there is more to life than a favorable balance to pleasure and pain." - Daniel Kahnaman, "Living and thinking about it: two perspectives on life."
- benignant: pleasant and beneficial in nature or influence | "It is simply a picturesque old house, in a fine park richly wooded; beautiful and benign: ‘O the solemn woods over which the light and shadow travelled swiftly, as if Heavenly wings were sweeping on benignant errands through the summer air.’" - Charles Dickens, Bleak House
- autochthon: the earliest known inhabitants of a region | "The Iliad represent no creed or opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and responsibility, as if we trod on native ground and were autochthons of the soil." - Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers | "He wrote of his admiration for Homer, who in his profound grasp of his place made even modern day readers, far removed in time and geography, feel as if they were 'autochthones of the soil.'" - Frederick Turner, Spirit of Place
Photo taken near Lexington, Mass ... where Thoreau, too, felt an 'autochthon of the soil' and the winds whirl their benignant errands.
(Learn how I easily capture these definitions and why I started this series, here).