High-Vocabulary Word of the Day

Endeavoring to contribute to your perspicacious lexicon.

  • Follow Daily

    You can follow High-Vocab WotD here, on Twitter

    You can follow High-Vocab WotD here, on Twitter

    And you can follow High-Vocab WotD, via our Facebook Page, here.

    And you can follow High-Vocab WotD, via our Facebook Page, here.

Posts Tagged ‘joyce’

Nefandous

Posted by kazvorpal on January 7, 2011


Chthulu, on the Nefandous Southpark

Nefandous

Unspeakable.

A most severe pejorative

Examples:

Then the earth
In birth nefandous Coeus life produced
And Iapetus and Typhoeus dire
And that bad brotherhood which joined in league
To abolish heaven
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno (1308)

Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that nefandous well.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour out of Space (1927)

No Topsman to your Tarpeia! This thing, Mister Abby, is nefand.
—  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

Etymology:

  • In Latin, ne = not, fandus = to speak
Advertisement

Posted in Grammar / Syntax, history, poetry | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Polymath

Posted by kazvorpal on August 5, 2010


Polymath

One with many skills or fields of knowledge; a renaissance man

Examples:

A Catholic sense of sin and a social sense of disaster, a fascination with the polymathic and polyglot artist and the strange and often gross and unbidden sources of art. Nor had Burgess taught languages or studied Joyce for nothing…
Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (1993)

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world.
Richard Dawkins, The Richard Dimbleby Lecture (1996)

Etymology:

A classical greek word, its parts are poly, many, and mathes, learned. The word “mathematics” does come from the same root word, as understanding numbers was once a sign of being educated.

Posted in history, Knowledge | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

 
%d bloggers like this: