Yvonne
Wondrous Words Wednesday … Is a weekly meme where we share new (to us) words that we have encountered in our reading
This would usually be my post as part of the ‘Wondrous Words Wednesday’ meme, which is hosted by the lovely Kathy @ BermudaOnion blog. However, Kathy is taking an extended and well-earned break from blogging, so I am sending her all Best Wishes and hope to have her back again very soon, she is sorely missed 🙂
I have so many new to me words stacking up, that I thought I would share just a few of them with you anyway, in the hope that Kathy won’t mind too much!
Lockdown may be changing yet again, but my new addiction to the ‘Daily Mail Crossword Of The Day’, definitely isn’t! Here is just another small selection of new to me words I have come across in my puzzling!
LOESS – An unstratified, geologically recent deposit of silty or loamy material that is usually buff or yellowish brown in colour and is chiefly deposited by the wind. Loess is a sedimentary deposit composed largely of silt-size grains that are loosely cemented by calcium carbonate.
CANTO – The canto () is a principal form of division in medieval and modern long poetry. The word canto is derived from the Italian word for “song” or “singing”, which comes from the Latin cantus, “song”, from the infinitive verb canere, “to sing”. The use of the canto was described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica as “a convenient division when poetry was more usually sung by the minstrel to his own accompaniment than read”. There is no specific format, construction or style for a canto and it is not limited to any one type of poetry.
EMOTE – To emote is to display emotions openly, especially while acting. An emote is an entry in a text-based chat client that indicates an action taking place. Unlike emoticons, they are not text art, and instead describe the action using words or images.
And just to round things off this time, a word I discovered in one of my recently read books:
“Barbara takes the headmaster through his evidence first, every line he delivers measured, polished, honed to perfection. It’s praise but not hagiography, a little criticism of Jeremy’s impetuous nature as a youth thrown in to temper his account, render it more impressive.”
HAGIOGRAPHY – A very admiring book about someone or a description of someone that represents the person as perfect or much better than they really are, or the activity of writing about someone in this way.
Four new to me words this time, how many did you recognise?
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I was only familiar with canto. I need to remember Hagiography though, as I might use that in the future.
Hi Anca,
I enjoyed discovering the definition of ‘hagiography’, however I don’t like the sound of the word itself. It somehow fails to fit the description very well!
It is also one of those words that I am probably not going to remember for very long, although that might just be an age thing!
I do wonder what kind of word I would come up with, if I needed to create one to describe something, for which nothing was readily available. 🙂
Of those four I have heard of canto but could not have told you what it meant other than it might be vaguely musical. And emote, which I have seen before but don’t tend to use as it feels a bit modern and trendy, two things I’ve never been accused of. 😀
Hi Cath,
I must admit that I never thought to associate ’emote’ with ’emoticons’, so that shows you how clued up I am! 🙂
On that basis I guess that ‘loess’ is a combination of lime and silt and ‘canto’ derives from choral?
Easy when you know how it’s done – but I’ll likely forget all that when the next strange new word comes my way 🙂 🙂
I definitely knew Canto and Emote. Loess is one I probably could have defined if given a set of multiple choice answers. Hagiography is new to me and I agree… it just doesn’t match its definition!! (I can’t get the thought of Haggis out of my mind!)
Hi Kelly,
Top marks today, go to you by the looks of things!
I did smile to think that you associated haggis with hagiography, when all could think of was a hag! – which is the exact opposite of the definition!
Just goes to show which one of us has the most twisted mind 🙂 🙂