~ ~ Wondrous Words Wednesday ~ ~

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Bermudaonion's Weblog where we share 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.

The following words are from The Easter Parade by Richard Yates


" The public relations photographer did his job well, and so did the editors of the rotogravure section of The New York Times."


1. Rotogravure
: (Roto or Gravure for short) is a type of intaglio printing process; that is, it involves engraving the image onto an image carrier. In gravure printing, the image is engraved onto a cylinder because, like offset printing and flexography, it uses a rotary printing press (the images to be printed are curved around a cylinder). Once a staple of newspaper photo features, the rotogravure process is still used for commercial printing of magazines, postcards, and corrugated (cardboard) product packaging. (from Wikipedia).


"It's not just a bore," she said once of a tiresome eighteenth-century novel, "it's a pernicious bore."
2. Pernicious
: highly injurious or destructive, deadly;
: archaic, wicked
(**this is one of those words that refuses to stick in my head!)


" There were small carbuncular knobs on the back of his neck and out across his shoulders, but if she squinted very slightly she didn't see them."


3. Carbuncular
: a painful local purulent inflammation of the skin and deeper tissues with multiple openings for the discharge of pus and usually necrosis and sloughing of dead tissue.




" But the messy stack of manuscript was there waiting for her in the morning, after a fitful sleep; and she had to acknowledge, with an editor's gelid eye, that it didn't read well at all."


4. Gelid
: extremely cold; icy

These words are from Volt: Stories by Alan Heathcock


" From high in his combine, Winslow eyed the dormant train, the engine far to the west, the coal cars deep into the eastern woods. "


1. Combine
: a harvesting machine for cutting and threshing grain in the field.


" From the corner of his eye, Winslow noticed a flash of white in the crop, then a crouching man sprang and dashed in front of the harrower. "


2. Harrower
: an agricultural implement with spike-like teeth or upright disks, drawn chiefly over plowed land to level it, break up clods, root up weeds, etc.


" Miriam heard something. A breaking in the swale. "


3. Swale
: a low place in a tract of land, usually moister and often having ranker vegetation than the adjacent higher land.
: a valleylike intersection of two slopes in a piece of land.