Wondrous Words Wednesday!

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a terrific weekly meme hosted by Bermudaonion's Weblog where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading. Feel free to join in the fun (please do!) Be sure to leave a link to your post over at Bermudaonion's Weblog.

All of today’s words are from The Widow's Story by Joyce Carol Oates

"If you have never been in a vehicle in which air bags have exploded you will have a difficult time imagining how violent, how forceful, how bellicose air bags are". (p.6)
**(I associated bellicose with loud, noisy so when I read this sentence I wanted to look it up & I'm glad I did!)

1. Bellicose ~adj.
:inclined or eager to fight; aggressively hostile; belligerent; combative.

"Unaccustomed to not working - that is, to not teaching - I felt useless, idle; my only solace was my writing, into which I poured enormous concentration - re-creating, with an obsessiveness that swerved between elation and compulsion, the vividly haunting oneiric cityscape of Detroit, in the novel Do with Me What You Will." (p.12)

2. Oneiric ~adj.
: Of, relating to, or suggestive of dreams.
~ related to the medical term Oneirophrenia meaning A mental state that is characterized by hallucinations and other disturbances and is associated with prolonged deprivation of sleep, sensory isolation, or psychoactive drugs


"None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events." (p.19)

3. Concatenation ~noun
: a series of interconnected events, concepts
: the act of linking together or the state of being joined. as in a chain


"For there is something ignoble, selfish in continuing to live as if nothing has been altered." (p.128)

4. Ignoble ~adj.
:of low character, aims; mean; base
:of low grade or quality; inferior