I occasionally post new-to-me words discovered via my literary rambles. I do this for my own edification. If you happened to stumble across this post and you are a word nerd (like me), then you might enjoy discovering these as well. Following each word is a short definition, trailed by the context in which the word was found. (Learn how I easily capture these and why I started this series, here).
- cicatrise: for a scar, after an injury | "One no longer cicatrized by such words, such action." - Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
- chatelaine: the mistress of a chateau or a large country house | "Bjørnvig was a guest at Rungstedlund until Christmas, the lost traveler ripe for a mystic romance who enters the enchanted castle and falls under the spell of its lonely chatelaine." - Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen, the Life of a Storyteller
- chimera: a grotesque product of the imagination | (I have stumbled across this word so many times, and at each stumble, still have not retained its meaning). "You cling to the religious ideas that cause you such suffering, and I to the chimera of style, which consumes me body and soul." - The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1880 | "Euripides had no patience for elevated language or the chimeras of nobility." - Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea | "For, all of your philosophy, what is it but a mere illusion and a Chimera?" - letter from Albert Burgh to Spinoza, World's Greatest Letters, Schuster
- accoucheur: a physician specializing in obstetrics | "To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes, I see the elder hand pressing receiving supporting." - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
- indite: produce a literary work | "There are many other examples of this connection - not necessarily a fear of death, as in Timor mortis conturbat me, but a definite concern with it - an intimation of transience, of evanescence, and thus of mortality, coupled with the urge to indite." - Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead