Day 302: I've Sub-Scribd

My new words for today are mostly from books located on my Christmas present. My boy gave me a one year subscription to Scribd. It's the Netflix of books. For a year I can read as many books as I possibly can from their apparently extensive (like, over a hundred thousand) collection. I have started with two: David Wolman's Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling (who would have thought spelling could be so entertaining to anyone other than an extreme word nerd like myself), and, Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma (a sort of 'The Big Chill' of books). I am in the process of nutting out an elaborate and complicated selection criteria for the next book to read, based on recommendations, which will hopefully have me reading things I may not ordinarily have. I'm spend way too much time looking at what the possible next books will be. Too exciting. But in the meantime I have discovered some new words and one (nascent) who's definition just won't stay with me for some reason, no matter how many times I look it up. Have you come across any interesting words lately? Come over and share them at Wondrous Words Wednesday.

orthography: spelling considered to be correct; the principles underlying spelling

Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling; David Wolman

'America was at war over words. The composition of words, to be precise—what some people call orthography and the rest of us call spelling.'
Or,
'Orthography, and irregular spellings in particular, retain the etymological fossils that give words historical richness and poetic power, and in turn give philologists something to do with their time.'


jeremiad: a prolonged lamentation or mournful complaint

Girlfriend in a Coma; Douglas Coupland

'During one particularly fevered patch of vegetarianism in the seventies, I made the mistake of saying I'd been to Benihana's Steak house; a brisk, half-hour, anti-meat jeremiad followed.'


nascent: starting to grow or develop; being born

Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling; David Wolman

'He [Noah Webster, of the Webster Dictionary fame] was a political animal, and in this sense he didn't think of his Speller as something that was merely about the lettering of words. It was in fact Phase 1 of his mission to help stitch the nascent nation together with words.'

Irene               List_Addict
And from a completely different book in a completely different format (Kindle) comes a word I have to warn you about. Don't proceed if you are squeamish or put off by bodily fluids or mentions of rather icky diseases, because the word that follows is of that ilk. It always fascinates me when a bigger group of 'thing' has exceptions known by a more specialised name. Like the differentiation of 'guano' from the larger group of general 'poops'. This is another:

gleet: a watery discharge from the uretha caused by gonorrhoeal infection

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; Mary Roach

'I don't mind Theo's matter-of-factness. Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.'

The Outfit Clearing the Closet: It’s time to go grey jumper dress. You unflatter me! Jumper Dress: Op-shopped Jeans: Primark Earrings: Old as time V——: Looking like he wishes this would end. Soon. Please! Shoes: Irregular Choice 'Cheeky Moose'

Photographer de Jour: B——

Who wore it better?

Putting a link on with: