- lambent: softly bright or radiant | "As in A Sport, you have an extraordinary nervous system: relaxed but quick, leisurely but alert, lambent but keen." - Memorable Days, The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps
- carapace: hard outer covering or case of certain organisms such as arthropods and turtles | "So the more that I’ve delved into this, the more I find that the carapace of the divinization of the Buddha, the metaphysical theories, begins to somehow fall away, and one recovers a deeply human setting, and a deeply human discourse." - Stephen Bachelor, in podcast interview from On Being
- pogrom: organized persecution of an ethnic group (especially Jews) | "If not even an avowed socialist can be bothered to grapple with reparations, if the question really is that far beyond the pale, if Bernie Sanders truly believes that victims of the Tulsa pogrom deserved nothing, that the victims of contract lending deserve nothing, that the victims of debt peonage deserve nothing, that that political plunder of black communities entitle them to nothing, if this is the candidate of the radical left—then expect white supremacy in America to endure well beyond our lifetimes and lifetimes of our children." - "Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?", The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates
- salutary: tending to promote physical well-being; beneficial to health | "Writing Through the Narrow Gate, some twelve years later, was a salutary experience. It made me confront the past, and I learned a great deal." - Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase
- elision: a deliberate act of omission | "Instead, the documentary consistently leads its viewers to the conclusion that Avery was framed by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department, and it contains striking elisions that bolster that theory." - Kathryn Schulz, "Dead Certainty", The New Yorker
Words is a weekly posting of new-to-me words I discover via my reading rambles (you can read more about how I capture these and why I started this series here).