vocabulary

Wednesday Word of the Week 5

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

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Word of the Week 5: Bray

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week I am backtracking five months to revisit possibly the best book I have read in the last half decade: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed’s acclaimed and joltingly poignant memoir of confronting both an untamed land and her own wild heart.

At twenty-six, still mourning the untimely death of her counter-culture mother, and burdened with a series of wrong steps and bad decisions, the author embarks on a grueling journey of self-discovery and healing. Woefully unprepared, she sets out to hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest trail—alone—from the Mohave Desert in California, through Oregon, to the Colombia River Gorge in southern Washington.

It is an amazing adventure; but this is not simply an adventure story. Rather, through seamlessly integrated flashbacks, we witness nothing short of a catharsis, of redemption through pain, of transcendence through struggle.

At the heart of that struggle is not only the young woman’s ultimate acceptance  of the loss of her mother to cancer at the age of forty-six, but her forgiveness of the way her mother lived her life. It is in a final passage on this theme that, in a howl of futility and rage, the author lends to this week’s mundane word a new, searing power to move.

“And then I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up. I had to bend over keening, while bracing my hands on my knees, my pack so heavy on top of me, my ski pole clanging out behind me in the dirt, the whole stupid life I’d had coming out my throat.”

Wild is one of the most heart-wrenching, skillfully constructed, lyrical, honest, and successfully realized memoirs I’ve come across in years. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear how it affected you.

And, if you’ve encountered a use of a word or phrase that has stopped you in your reading tracks this week, consider sharing it here.

Wednesday Word of the Week 4

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

Into Thin Air

Word of the Week 4: Laggard(ly)

Welcome back to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from Jon Krakauer’s harrowing and controversial account of the disastrous 1996 ascent of Mount Everest, Into Thin Air.

Contracted by Outside magazine to join and write an article about a guided ascent of Mount Everest in May of that year, Krakauer got much more than he bargained for when a wicked convergence of circumstances—human error, poor judgment, and damnably bad luck with the weather—conspired to bring about the worst mountaineering disaster on record. By the time he descended to Base Camp, nine climbers from four expeditions had perished, three more would succumb shortly, and at least two were left severely maimed from frostbite.

What makes Krakauer’s account so grippingly enjoyable is not only his insider’s informed take on alpine climbing, but his Valkyrian (another great word employed in this book) command of the language. Here, in a passage describing a second attempt to reach Camp Three, is this week’s example:

“A thousand feet up the immense slant of the Lhotse Face, I ascended a faded nylon rope that seemed to go on forever, and the higher I got, the more laggardly I moved.”

Having pulled this book off my shelf for a quick study in grabbing the reader’s attention from the first paragraph, filling in historical and personal detail without bogging down into an “information dump,” and crafting dynamic and memorable characters, my earlier hunch that this was a book to be savored once a decade was reaffirmed.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “laggard” or “laggardly,” or other words like it. Comment here if you are not feeling too laggardly yourself.

Wednesday Word of the Week 2

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

WhenTheAirHitsYourBrain

Word of the Week 2: Pummel

Welcome to my second post of Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery by Frank Vertosick, Jr., M.D, a captivating yet shockingly funny account of the author’s neurosurgical residency.

Dr. Vertosick may belong to the rarest breed of doctors, but with his blue-color background, the story he tells is one of an everyman confronted with extraordinary challenges: the deaf, mute, obese, nicotine-addicted “trisomy 21” (i.e. Down Syndrome) patient; the stunningly beautiful, pregnant, fundamentalist Christian with a brain tumor who refuses chemotherapy to save her baby; the young female car-accident victim with both a fractured skull and a perforated heart; the infant with water on the brain.

It is in describing one of these patients, a young Nigerian foreign exchange student with a dramatic case of MS, that Dr. Vertosick wins his place in this post. After recounting how the young man’s arms and legs become uncontrollable, “flailing about like octopus tentacles,” he conjures up a powerful image of the effects of this terrible disease by using a word commonly employed in a very different context.

“His face was swollen from attempts to brush his teeth, attempts which resulted only in a self-inflicted pummeling.”

I am not sure what I expected when I delved into the genre of medical memoir, but it was hardly the brilliant metaphors, surpassingly poignant reflections on life, illness and death, and skillfully rendered characters that make When the Air Hits Your Brain a page turner to the last period. And while the book makes one glad for dedicated physicians like Dr. Vertosick, it also provokes some regret that the doctor is not a full-time author.

How might you use the word “pummel” in a context unrelated to fighting? Can you think of a similar example of a word used in a wildly different context from the one in which it is usually employed? What’s your word of the week? Feel free to share your thoughts here.

Wednesday Word of the Week 1

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments

Word of the Week 1: Yokelry

Welcome to my debut post of Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore’s 1953 alternative history in which the Confederacy won the “War of Southron Independence” after the surrender of the United States of America in 1864.

The year is 1940. Barbara, a brilliant beautiful physicist, cold-hearted cynic, and emotionally volatile polyandrist, has Hodge, the country rube of a protagonist and budding historian, in her grip. When Hodge questions the viability of Barbara’s scheme to translate matter-energy into terms of space-time, thus making time travel possible, Barbara strikes back with a typically brittle and demeaning observation:

“Thank you. It’s always nice to know one has amused the yokelry.”

Ouch! Kudos to the author, Ward Moore. I had not read him before but reveled in the power of his  Dickension vision of a defeated and impoverished United States in mid-twentieth century.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “yokel” or “yokelry,” or other words like it. Have you encountered a use of a word or phrase that has stopped you in your reading tracks this week? If so, consider sharing it here.