Glossary

One of the most important books in a reader’s library is the dictionary. Here are a few words I’ve had to look up in my reading or that I thought were noteworthy.

Amended March 7, 2011

A

Acheron – a river from Greek mythology over which the dead were ferried by Charon

adamantine – hard, unyielding (the last syllable may be pronounced like teen, tin or tine, which could come in handy for rhyming)

aerolith, n. – a meteor (such as on might see in the empyrean)

aliquot – an adjective that describes something that is an exact divisor, or factor
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, OneLook

For example, when you factor a number, such as 60, you find its aliquot parts, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30.

angstrom, n. – unit of length equal to one ten-millionth of a millimeter (10-7 mm), mainly used to express electromagnetic wavelengths (named for Swedish astronomer Andes Johann Ångström)
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, OneLook

aprioristic, adj. – preconceived, or considered valid independent of observation or evidence

“The grid for historical interpretation is more than something that facilitates the selection and interpretation of evidence: it offers an all-encompassing aprioristic view of reality into which the phenomena of history must be made to fit, whether by fair means or foul.”

-Carl R. Trueman, Histories and Fallacies

Argus – a giant with 100 eyes from Greek mythology

C

cagoule – a hooded, weatherproof jacket
Cambridge Dictionary, TheFreeDictionary

canescent – downy, as in the whitish or grayish down on some plants
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

caul – part of the amnion sometimes covering the head of a child at birth
Dictionary.com, OneLook

celebutante – a young woman who is famous for no discernable reason (from celebrity + debutante)

cicerone – a guide for sightseers (pronounced with a long e at the end)

cloaca – a sewer
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

concertina – noun musical instrument resembling an accordion with hexagonal bellow and button-keys – verb to fold or collapse like a concertina
Dictionary.com, OneLook

crepuscular – resembling or active at twilight
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

cuprous – containing univalent copper
Dictionary.com, OneLook

curlew, n. – a shorebird with a long beak that curves down, of the genus Numenius

D

dalton, n. – unit of mass used to express the mass of atomic and subatomic particles equal to 1/12 the mass of the carbon-12 atom; another name for an atomic mass unit (named for English chemist John Dalton)
TheFreeDictionary, Encarta, YourDictionary

disembogue – pour out
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

demimonde, n. – women with wealthy lovers who have lost standing in society because of indiscretions or promiscuity; courtesans or prostitutes (an individual woman of this class is a demimondaine)
Dictionary.com

“Humiliation no longer threatens the individual who hasn’t read a book, but the one who has; reading is seen as a degrading task that may be left to a woman of the demimonde.”
-Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

doyenne – a woman with seniority in her profession or organization (feminine form of doyen)

“Sue Carter of the University of California at Irvine is famous as the doyenne of research on this potent hormone of attachment [oxytocin], which she has studied extensively in the prairie vole.”
-Stephen Post & Jill Neimark, Why Good Things Happen to Good People

E

elegiac, adj. - expressing sorrow or mourning

empyrean – sky

“The very empyrean seemed to be a secret.”
-G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

endogenous – internally originated
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, TheFreeDictionary, Encarta

“Because the internally focused [performance assessment and evaluation] frameworks of the [community water system] sector are based on endogenous measures of performance, they narrowly asses performance in terms of core processes, which differ by [community water system].”
-Jeffrey W. Rogers & Garrick E. Louis. “A standard efficiency metric for evaluation performance of community water systems.” Journal AWWA 97.10 (2005): 79-80.

F

fissiparous, adj. – tending to split into factions

“Marxism has proved as fissiparous a philosophy as it has a political ideology.”

-Carl R. Truman, Histories and Fallacies

G

ghee – clarified butter
Dictionary.com, OneLook

glaucous - greenish blue or bluish green
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

I

inanition, n. – exhaustion from lack of nourishment; lethargy

L

lacuna – missing part (the middle syllable is pronounced like queue)

Laocöon, n. – Trojan priest who warned against accepting the horse left by the Greeks (Trojan horse); he and his sons were killed by serpent bites

lido – a beach resort or open-air swimming pool
Dictionary.com, OneLook



M

mantic – related to or having the power of divination
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

meretricious, adj. – having a flashy or vulgar allure, insincere or pretentious; characteristic of a prostitute

moue – a pout
Dictionary.com, OneLook

multitexting – the rude and dangerous activity of reading and writing text message on mobile communication devices, including e-mail message in the case of crackberry addicts, while engaged in other activities such as walking, driving, attending meetings and dining with others (from multitasking)

O

ouroborus, n. – a symbol of a snake or dragon eating its tail
Dictionary.com, OneLook

outré, adj. – unconventional or bizarre

P

patulous – spreading
Dictionary.com, TheFreeDictionary, Merriam-Webster Online, OneLook, YourDictionary

"Above the spire of St Paul’s, patulous white clouds deepened to a shade reminiscent of overwashed socks."
-Christopher Fowler, The Water Room

phenology – the study of the timing of recurring natural events
Websters, Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster


plover, n. – a shorebird having a thick neck, compact body, and pigeon-like beak, of the family Charadriidae, or a similar bird

prolegomenon, n. – scholarly preface (you can tell it is scholarly by its length)

putsch, n. – a revolt or uprising
Merriam-Webster, Encarta

R

retrosexual, n. – a man who cares little for or minimally attends to his appearance (i.e., the opposite of a metrosexual), or a man who adopts an old-fashioned masculine style (especially the suit-and-hat style of the 1950s and 1960s)
Merriam-Webster

S

sesquipedalian, adj. – multisyllabic
Merrian-Webster.com

“Do not build monuments to obfuscatory sesquipedalian tergiversation.”
-Elizabeth Slatkin in How to Write a Manual

sibilant, adj. - hissing

soidisant – self-styled, so-called, pretended (from French and pronounced in something of that style, i.e. swa-dee-zahn’)


spoor, n. – track or trail, especially of a wild animal
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster.com

“The victory always lies in our hunger for the spiritual intimacy of our union with Christ. In some since it is more than a hunger, it is a stalking—pursuing God as a safari tracks the spoor of big game”
-Calvin Miller, Into the Depths of God

stoat – the European ermine, Mustela erminea
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

suspire, v. – to utter with sighing breaths
Wordnik.com, Yahoo! Education

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame:
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
-T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

syncretistic, adj. – attempting the reconciliation of opposing principles, practices or parties

“Catholicism’s commitment to the developing cult of the saints was surly one of its great strengths during the church’s massive expansion during the fourth and fifth centuries, and the winning strategy of a somewhat syncretistic pattern of handling folk religion right down into the fifteenth century.”

-Carl R. Trueman, Histories and Fallacies

T

tergiversation, n. – a constantly changing, unclear or misleading opinion or attitude
OneLook.com



threnody, n. – a song of lamentation
traduce, v.t. – to speak maliciously or falsely, to slander or defame

V

viridescent – greenish
Dictionary.com, OneLook

vulpine – fox-like
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online


W

whinge, v. – to cry, to complain, to whine
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster

X

xanthic – yellowish
Dictionary.com, Dict.org, The Free Dictionary, Webster’s Online, Your Dictionary

Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore

 Psychotherapist Thomas Moore, a former Catholic monk, expressed some unusual ideas about depression in his book Dark Nights of the Soul. I feel I should preface my comments with a caveat. If you have clinical depression, or think you might, please seek help from an appropriate professional in psychology, counseling or medicine. If you need medication, take it. I think you can undertake the kind exploration that Moore suggests without abandoning traditional therapies, especially if you need them to mitigate extreme symptoms that threaten your life and health.

 Moore isn’t necessarily talking about clinical depression, though he doesn’t exclude it. He finds the term depression limiting. If someone is depressed, they have a disease and there is a treatment for it. It is a matter of curing and dealing with symptoms.

As an alternative to this approach, Moore focuses on the opportunities in depression, persistent dark moods and hard times—dark nights may take any of these forms—as opportunities to mature, grow and heal the soul. Instead of rushing to get by depression and get better, sit with it, explore it and learn from it.  It could be a calling from your truest self to examine your life and become deeper, more engaged person. Instead of a curse, the dark night may turn out to be a gift.

Moore draws heavily on religion and mythology. He also discusses dreams. In the mode of Carl Jung, he sees value in symbols to illuminate what is going on in your life, as well as the value of symbolic and ritual action.

For instance, he draws a model from myth for the experience of depression. It begins with a separation or departure. One feels cut off, alone or isolated, especially from normal life. In a myth, this leaving of normal life is the beginning of an adventure. The mythic adventurer enters a new world, often and underworld, where he is challenged and gains a new perspective. These challenges help him discover who he really is. It is helpful to be able to move back and forth between the underworld and night to the upper world and day, to be able to benefit from the darkness without being consumed by it. In the end, the adventurer returns to his normal life, but it is not always easy because he is changed by his experiences in the underworld. Hopefully the lessons of his dark night well help him integrate his new life with the best of his old home.

Perspective seems to be one of the big benefits of a dark night. Everything looks different in the dark. You can reevaluate what things mean to you, the seeming trash that is truly a treasure and the seeming treasure that is truly worthless. It's a chance to clear out the clutter. It pushes you to accept that the darkness is real and part of you. Because the underworld is essentially your inner life, you can find by exploring it those places that are abandoned, ignored, neglected or run over roughshod by your outer life.

Each chapter takes on the exploration of various aspects of life that may bring about a dark night. These include love, sex, marriage, family, art, beauty, anger, disease and aging.

These journeys into darkness need not be undertaken alone. Sometimes you need professional help. The honesty and vulnerability needed to properly explore the dark parts of yourself could help you be a more open person and deepen your relationship with others. To succeed in the journey, it helps to have the attitude toward yourself of a graceful healer participating in your own life, and that attitude can make you receptive to the healing grace of others and your role as a helper of others.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Beethoven Factor by Paul Pearsall

The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need by Paul Pearsall

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Moore, Thomas. Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals. New York: Gotham Books, 2004.

My Inventions by Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla’s autobiography, collected under the title My Inventions, originally appeared as six articles in issues of Electrical Experimenter in 1919. It is a surprisingly thin book, especially in light of the several biographies that have been written about him, and the possibly greater volumes propounding the mythology of an almost demi-god genius.

To be fair, Tesla was a very creative and productive inventor. His AC motors, and the power systems that support them, enabled a new level of industrial power and automation. In many ways it was the technological foundation of the power grid we have today.

Tesla was ahead of his time and he realized it. He knew that the success of AC motors was greatly aided by coming about at the right time. Even so, it took many years from Tesla’s design to become a prototype and for that to become a commercial product with an infrastructure to support its use. At the time he wrote My Inventions, the value and practicality of his later inventions were still hard for many to see.

One of these later inventions was the radio. Tesla didn’t use that term “radio.”  It’s probably fair to say that he misunderstood the phenomena he was working with. Even so, he could produce radio transmissions and put them to practical use. As a demonstration, he built radio-controlled boats. It’s a stretch to say that Tesla envisioned smart phones, but he foresaw the possibility of using radio to transmit many kinds of data and signals, sometimes to devices “not bigger than a watch.”

“The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness thru all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways,” Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

These articles were written at the end of World War I. Tesla reflected on the potentials of technology in peace and war. He imagined that wireless communication could shrink the world, leading to the kind of cultural exchange, common ground and commercial connections that would reinforce peace. He also imagined a rocket that could be guided to its target by radio control or internal mechanism; we could call it an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Though visionary, he was not an infallible genius. He held to notions of physics that were not supported even by the science of his time. He had some wild ideas about psychology, biology and other fields, though some of these were no more far-out and off the mark that many that were popularly accepted by his contemporaries.

Tesla wrote very much from his own experience and perspective. Though he speaks of his upbringing in eastern Europe, his education and his career in Europe and the United States, he spends little time reflecting on the places, cultures and broader events he experience. You’ll learn more about Tesla’s peculiar ailments than about the life of youth in late-19^th Century Croatia. Perhaps that wouldn’t have sold many issues of Electrical Experimenter.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. 1919. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995.