A Short History of Nearly Everything: Part VI

by Bill Bryson
In this engaging work of nonfiction, Bill Bryson explores profound questions about the origins of the universe, the development of life on Earth, and modern civilization.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Introduction–Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. quiescent
    not active or activated
    In 1815 on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, a handsome and long- quiescent mountain named Tambora exploded spectacularly, killing a hundred thousand people with its blast and associated tsunamis.
  2. epiphany
    a usually sudden insight, perception, or understanding of something
    His moment of epiphany came when he realized that a moraine, or line of rocks, near his family estate in Scotland, which he had passed hundreds of times, could only be understood if one accepted that a glacier had dropped them there.
  3. vacillating
    uncertain in purpose or action
    His marriage was breaking up, Schimper was hotly accusing him of the theft of his ideas, Charpentier wouldn’t speak to him, and the greatest living geologist offered support of only the most tepid and vacillating kind.
  4. eccentricity
    a circularity that deviates from a circular path
    In particular it is subject to three changes in position, known formally as its obliquity, precession, and eccentricity, over long periods of time.
  5. permafrost
    ground that is permanently frozen
    At the height of the last period of glaciation, around twenty thousand years ago, about 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface was under ice. Ten percent still is and a further 14 percent is in a state of permafrost.
  6. sumptuous
    rich and superior in quality
    In the long run, incidentally, ice ages are by no means bad news for the planet. They grind up rocks and leave behind new soils of sumptuous richness, and gouge out fresh water lakes that provide abundant nutritive possibilities for hundreds of species of being.
  7. variability
    the quality of being uneven and lacking uniformity
    Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or human-like) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock.
  8. diorama
    a three-dimensional representation of a scene
    The American Museum of Natural History in New York has an absorbing diorama that records the moment of their passing.
  9. tableau
    any dramatic scene
    The tableau is done with such conviction that it is easy to overlook the consideration that virtually everything above the footprints is imaginary.
  10. arboreal
    of or relating to or formed by trees
    "Lucy and her kind did not locomote in anything like the modern human fashion," insists Tattersall. "Only when these hominids had to travel between arboreal habitats would they find themselves walking bipedally, ‘forced’ to do so by their own anatomies."
  11. amenable
    disposed or willing to comply
    Very few parts of the world are even vaguely amenable to the long-term preservation of human remains
  12. simian
    relating to or resembling an ape or a monkey
    Right up until the middle of the twentieth century the accepted anthropological view of the Neandertal was that he was dim, stooped, shuffling, and simian — the quintessential caveman.
  13. insuperable
    incapable of being surpassed or excelled
    In other words, the very factors that had allowed them to survive successfully for a hundred thousand years suddenly became an insuperable handicap.
  14. osseous
    composed of or containing bone
    We possess much less information than most people suppose — a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth-century naturalist H. E. Strickland.
  15. salient
    conspicuous, prominent, or important
    But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is.
Created on Thu Feb 23 21:44:59 EST 2017 (updated Tue Jul 01 13:28:50 EDT 2025)

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