Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Wondrous Words Wednesday (29)



Welcome back, wordy friends!

Wondrous Words Wednesday is hosted by BermudaOnion each week. It's an opportunity to share new words you've encountered in your reading, or highlight words that you particularly enjoy.

Here are three of my favorite new-to-me words from Found Objects by Peter Gelfan.  
All definitions from Dictionary.com.

1. roué. "Harl thinks he and I have a lot in common; he sees me as a fellow roué, a man who lives as he wants to and f*ck 'em if they can't take a joke."

noun
a dissolute and licentious man; rake.

What a fancy word for a distinctly non-fancy meaning!

2. misanthrope. "The chances of getting caught prohibited searching his room or his car, so I opted for the favorite tactic of the armchair misanthrope and hit the Web."  

noun
a hater of humankind.

Harsh!  I think the narrator meant it with a bit of cheek here though.

3. verisimilitude. "I'm suspicious of such searches, not only because memory more and more seems like imagination brushed with a patina of verisimilitude, but also because at the time these moments happen, we can't see their consequences and only much later look back upon them as defining."
noun
1. the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability: The play lacked verisimilitude.
2. something, as an assertion, having merely the appearance of truth.

Once I saw the definition, I realized I could have figured it out from the "veri" root.  Good word.

What are your new words this week?

11 comments:

  1. haha I love misanthrope because lately, I can identify with it!! ;)

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  2. All new for me, interesting words.

    http://tributebooksmama.blogspot.com/2013/05/wondrous-words-wednesday_15.html

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  3. I know misanthrope and have a feeling I've heard verisimilitude before, though I didn't know what it meant. Roue is a completely new one, I suppose if it means "rake" and "rake" is used a lot, that's why it might not be as popular.

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  4. Verisimilitude is another of those words that seem familiar to me but I can't quite define it or use it. Now I understand the meaning. I'm going to havre to work on the pronunciation next before it becomes my own. Thanks for sharing Kelly.

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    1. Yes, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue if you're not familiar with it, eh?

  5. All new words to me. I wonder if I will be able to insert them into my daily language? Hmmmmm?

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  6. I knew these. Roué is in the song "Sixteen going on Seventeen" in the Sound of Music so I looked it up when I was a kid. Misanthrope came up in a Woman's Studies class in college -- sometimes, women believe they're witnessing misogyny when, actually, it's much more general misanthropy. And, verisimilitude is something that fiction writers strive for. I've most often heard it used when writing historical fiction -- accuracy isn't required in historical fiction, but verisimilitude is.

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    1. Wow Joy, thanks for the comment! You put all of these words in a great context for me.

  7. I'M familiar with all three of these really fabulous words, but only really knew the meaning of misanthrope. Thanks for reminding me of the others.

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  8. I feel like I should have known the second and third words but I didn't. I need to start using my new words a little more so I'll remember them better.

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    1. Yes, I need to do that too! I often stumble across words in books that I've already featured on WWW, and I sometimes have to go back to my post to remind me of the definition...haha.

 
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