The Moon is a Marble

Discourses Relating to Art and Science

Saturday, January 02, 2010

 

Pop Quiz

BLOOD MERIDIAN VOCABULARY

or

THE MOST OBSCURE WORDS
in the
ENGLISH LANGUAGE



(page numbers from Vintage International May 1982 printing)

Some surrounding context is given below, and that is usually enough for you to pretend like you know what the word means. But let's be honest.

Under no circumstances should you ever use any of these words to verbally communicate with another human being.

* * *

Parricide
"He sees a parricide hanged in a crossroads hamlet and the man's friends run forward and pull his legs and he hangs dead from his rope while urine darkens his trousers."
p.5

Shellalegh [sic, dictionary fail as spelled]
"He was carrying a huge shellalegh."
p.9

"He found the mule and unstalled it and bridled it with the rawhide hackamore and led it to the fence."
p.14

Sprent
"The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less."
p.15

Pilotbread [dictionary fail]
"That night he sat in the herders' camp and ate beans and pilotbread and heard of life on the trail."
p.20

* * *

Purlieu
"The mission occupied eight or ten ares of enclosed land, a barren purlieu that held a few goatsand burros."
p.26

*bonus word: I didn't even notice "ares" on the first read through.
Ares

Awap [dictionary fail]
"The huge carved and paneled doors hung awap on their hinges and a carved stone Virgin held in her arms a headless child."
p.27

Halms
"The boy pulled at the halms of grass."
p.30

Settle (n.)
"They eased themselves into a kind of settlemade from some dark wood.
p.31

Weskit
"A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers."
p.39

* * *

Raillery
"By full dark the blackened ribracks leaned steaming at the fires and there was a jousting over the coals with shaven sticks whereon were skewered gobs of meat and a clank of canteens and endless raillery."
p.44

Sutler
"The dust of the party raised was quickly dispersed and lost in the immensity of that landscape and there was no dust other for the pale sutler who pursued them drives unseen and his lean horse and his lean cart leave no track upon such ground or any ground.
p.44

Felloes, duledge pegs
"The wheels shrank and the spokes reeled in their hubs and clattered like loomshafts and at night they'd drive false spokes ino the mortices and tie them down with strips of green hide and they'd drive wedges between the iron of the tires and the suncracked felloes. ... The duledge pegs worked loose and dropped behind.
p.45

Anareta [dictionary fail]
"Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night.
p.46

Jacal
... "rode up off the desert through a gap in the low stone hills and down upon a solitary jacal, crude hut of mud and wattles and a rudimentary stable and corrals."
p.48

* * *

Bistre
"The corrugated forms of the riders passed jingling across the dry bistre land and across the mud facade of the jacal, the horses trembling, smelling water."
p.48

Corbels
"There were buzzards squatting among the old carved wooden corbels and he picked up a stone and squailed it at them but they never moved."
p.58

*bonus word: I didn't notice "squailed" on the first read either. Apparently it means "threw awkwardly."

Porphyry
... "idlers reclined on carven seats of white porphyry and past the governor's palace and past the" ... ... ... ... ... "hides clapping against the stones." (14 line, one sentence paragraph.)
p.72

Flensed
... "and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull" ...
p.73

Thews
... "riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description" ...
... "decorated with human teeth and" ...
Scapulars
... (5 lines later, same sentence) "and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human" ...
p.78

* * *

Pritchel
... "a Jew named Speyer pried open the box with a pritchel and a shoeing hammer" ...
p.82

Shoddy (n.)
... "and then turned and made his way to the trove of shoddy partly offloaded from the burros."
p.91

Bruited
scurvid
"The advent of the riders bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among the crumbling walls."
p.97

mare imbrium
... "and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight" ...
p.105

Madstone
"It also held a madstone from the inward parts of some beast and the judge examined and pocketed."
p.110
(synonym: bezoar)

* * *

Pyrolatrous
"That night they sat at the fire like ghosts in their dusty beards and clothing, rapt, pyrolatrous."
p.111

diligence (object)
"As they entered the foothills they came upon a dusty old diligence with six horses in the traces grazing the dry grass in a fold among the barren scrag.
p.112

marl
"They rode through marl and terracotta and rifts of copper shale and they rode through a wooded swag and out upon a promontory" ...
p.113

cantonment
"The squatters emerged and stood about the cantonment blinking like birds."
p.118

ignus fatuus
"Like some ignus fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke."
p.120

* * *

merestone
"I said that it was a merestone for to mark him out of nothing at all."
p.125

recruit (verb used with horse)
... "and we halted to regroup and to recruit the horses."
p.127

nitre
"But it was the nitre. The nitre, you see."
p.127

alpenstock
... "his bag over his shoulder and his rifle for alpenstock."
p.131

coulees
"In the blue coulees on the north slopes narrow tailings of old snow."
p.136

* * *

enfilade
"They rode in narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats" ...
p.139

rill
... "for there was no sound of them or wind or bird in the place but only the light rill of water running over the sand in the dark below their fires."
p.140

hogan
"It crouched against the rear wall of the hogan and bared its teeth" ...
p.149

spanceled
Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows on the snowblue ground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advanced those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy behind them like some third aspect of their presence hammered out black and wild upon the naked grounds."
p.151

legatees
"They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote."
p.152

starsprent (see sprent)
p.154

* * *

whang [interesting - etymologic of wang (slang)?]
"The men were stringing up scalps on strips of leather whang and some of the dead lay with broad slices of hide cut from their backs" ...
p.159

argosy
"They watched the passing of that bloodstained argosy through their streets with dark and solemn eyes."
p.175

suzerain
"What's a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or overlord."

withy
"Glanton wandered through the tall and dusty rooms with their withy ceilings" ...
p.200

pulque
"A skin of pulque hung from a tripod in the center of the yard" ...

* * *

frog (n. relating to hoof)
"The frog of the hoof was split and bloody" ...
p.209

whinstones
... "until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings."
p.213

scrog
"When the sun rose he was asleep under the smoldering skeleton of a blackened scrog."

baldric
... "he carried a sword and he carried in a torn and gaudy baldric one of the Whitneyville Colts that had belonged to the scouts."
p.228

urstone [definition ur- number 3, with -stone)
... "yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and" ...
p.243

* * *

holothurians
"The bones of cholla that glowed there in their incandescent basketry pulsed like burning holothurians in the phosphorous dark of the sea's deeps."
p.243

lazarous
"They spent the afternoon drinking in a lazarous bodega run by a Mexican."
p.268

* * *

And the rest. It looks like I gave up and wrote down nonsense words, but these all appear in the book.

thaumturge

atavistic

fard

thrapple

helve

sprues

systole

siliceous

spoilbanks

midden

replivened

pampooties

gravers

burins

muttersome

tyrolean

gaitered

crinoline

scapegrace

peignoirs

* * *

To be honest, once you get done researching what the word means, the sentence in which it appears is a precise and beautiful creation. But without being familiar with the word, it sounds like you are reading from Dr. Seuss or L. Ron Hubbard.

__ If you knew more than 5 of these you have a pretty wide vocabulary.
__ If you knew more than half of these, you are some sort of time-travelling 19th-century genius Apache doctor of metallurgy and classical literature.

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Comments:
The word "Ares" is, I am sure, a misprint for 'acres'.

Simon Peters
 
@Simple_simon. That would make sense. I thought that he might have been using the definition:

a surface measure equal to 100 square meters, or 119.6 square yards; 1 / 100 of a hectare.

A link to the Google books snippet is below.
http://books.google.com/books?id=s-QzccStux4C&lpg=PP1&dq=blood%20meridian&pg=PA28#v=snippet&q=%22The%20mission%20occupied%20eight%20or%20ten%22&f=false
 
Ahem, link was too long. Here it is. It says "acres." Thanks Simple_simon.
http://tinyurl.com/8y7hajq
 
I always figured it was short for 'hectares'
 
Maybe I missed them on the list, but you seem to have missed two of my favorites, from pages 106 and 107; 'apishamore' (I think it's a saddle blanket), and 'swapt', referring to what black jackson did to white jackson's head.
 
I wish that it were actually "ares." I have never thought of the hect- in hectare being a prefix, meaning 100x, for "-are." It just fits so wall with the rest of these obscure words. So, the barren purlieu would be either 100 ft on a side (9 ares) or about 600 ft on a side (9 acres).

Apishamore, so perfectly specific and dead. Nice catch. And swapt, I guess from swap, with roots in the sound made during a handshake. Pretty good for a casual decapitation.
 
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