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.
clepsydra: clock that measures time by the escape of water | “At certain hours of the day, when all the sand fell in the clepsydra, those who are a part of the community should become immobile and look attentively at the position in which they found themselves…” - Maria Gabriela Llansol, The Geography of Rebels Trilogy | The clepsydra of our imperfection marked the passing of the unreal hours with slow, regular drops of dreaming ... Nothing is worthwhile, my distant love, except knowing how sweet it is to know that nothing is worthwhile … - The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
scrannel: thin or light, squeaky or unmelodious | “If I saw wood from morning to night, though I grieve that I could not observe the train of my thoughts during that time, yet, in the evening, the few scrannel lines which describe my day's occupations will make the creaking of the saw more musical than freest fantasies could have been.” - The Journal, Henry David Thoreau
vestigial: not fully developed in mature animals | “I have searched myself to understand why I wrote my cousin that day. I still don’t have a perfect answer, but I know some things are true. I know that love can be vestigial.” -heard on The Daily from the episode, “Man to Man” in The New York Times
sempiternal: having no known beginning and presumably no end | “In the center a fine discontinuous curtain — or network — falls implacably and yet gently in drops that are probably quite light; a strengthless sempiternal precipitation, an intense fraction of the atmosphere at its purest.” Francis Ponge, from the poem “Rain”
mimesis: the imitative representation of nature and human behavior in art and literature | “We may start believing that we are recreating an experience, that we are making an attempt at mimesis, but then the language takes over.” - Charles Simic, The Life of Images | “Due to the fact that the mimesis of the laudatory canon does not facilitate the utilitarian and social orientation of Neruda's poetry, the study analyzes a series of innovations developed by the poet in order to reach the proletarian masses which constitute the target audience of the Nerudian discourse.” - “Pablo Neruda's Odes: The influence of Pindar, Horace and Marx,” by Mary Ilu Altman