James McBride's novel The Good Lord Bird, a retelling of the John Brown story through the eyes of a young, escaped slave boy passing as a girl was billed by The New York Times as "a brilliant romp of a novel," and awarded the National Book Award last night. But how does it hold up from a vocabularian's perspective? Pretty well, it turns out. Right there in the opening passage, we encountered a word that sent us to the Dictionary: the rich and rare four-flusher.Continue reading...
Writing about the upcoming BBC "The Day of the Doctor" special being released in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the original "Dr. Who," Jill Lepore, of The New Yorker used quisling in a curious way.Continue reading...
In a review of Double Down, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's behind-the-scenes story of the 2012 election, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times chides Halerin and Heilemann for their "caffeinated prose," noting the presence of coriaceousin particular.Continue reading...
In a story about the opening of an online archive of Emily Dickinson manuscripts taken from the Amherst College and Harvard University archives, the New York Times quotes an Amherst archivist as saying of the Harvard-Amherst relationship, "They have the furniture, we have the daguerreotype; they have the herbarium, we have the hair." Harvard vs. Amherst aside, we had to wonder what a herbarium actually is.Continue reading...
Eleanor Catton, who was awarded the Man Booker Prize earlier this week for her novel The Luminaries, uses the rare and interesting spume.Continue reading...
In the first sentences of her new, highly-acclaimed novel The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt uses the uncommon inwrought to conjure a mood of creepy fairy tale isolation.Continue reading...