Word of the day: flâneur

The word of the day is flâneur:

< French flâneur, < flâner: see flânerie n.

A lounger or saunterer, an idle ‘man about town’. Also transf.  (OED)

"Banville's exploratory monologues owe much to the modernist idea of the disaffiliated flâneur, Poe's 'man of the crowd,' who creeps through the teeming city, or through the dreamscapes of his own mind, trying to 'understand and appreciate everything that happens,' as Baudelaire puts it.  The 'mainspring of his genius is his curiosity,' Baudelaire added, and this description could equally describe the average noir detective.  Indeed, the meandering flâneur and the solitary noir detective have so much in common that they could even be dark brothers.  Joyce's Leopold Bloom, Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Borges's detective Lönnrot, Black's Quirke, and Banville's various narrators all creep through their own lives, and the lives of other people, amassing fragments, shards of experience, trying to understand something—anything—of death, of disappearance, the past, or why we live and perish, or the bizarreness of what we call ordinary life.  They share a refusal of the world of 'other people', a sense that exclusion is the only option.  To be an insider—for flâneurs and detectives, for Banville and for Black—is to be an enemy or a fool."

 - Joanna Kavenna, "Pseudonymously Yours: The strange case of Benjamin Black", 11 & 18 July 2011 The New Yorker

Word of the day: truckle

The word of the day is truckle:

Anglo-Norman trocle, trokle, < Latin trochlea = Greek τροχιλία, τροχιλέα, etc., sheaf of a pulley

 A low bed running on truckles or castors, usually pushed beneath a high or ‘standing’ bed when not in use; a trundle-bed. (OED)


"The difference is in emphasis, but these are often sleight-of-hand gestures, magician's tricks, making us think that things are substantially different when really they are almost the same.  Here is Banville on the shifting self: 'Is the oldster in his dotage the same that he was when he was an infant swaddled in his truckle bed?'  Here is Black: 'Isn't it strange to think... that people who are old now were young once, like us?  I meet an old woman in the street and tell myself that seventy years ago she was a baby in her mother's arms.  How can they be the same person, her as she is now and the baby as it was then?'"

 - Joanna Kavenna, "Pseudonymously Yours: The strange case of Benjamin Black", 11 & 18 July 2011 The New Yorker

Word of the day: swot

The word of the day is swot:


According to a contributor to N. & Q. 1st Ser. I. 369/2, the term originated at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in the use on one occasion of the expression ‘It mades one swot’ (= sweat) by the Scottish professor of mathematics, William Wallace.
slang.

 

1. Work or study at school or college; in early use spec. mathematics. Hence gen. labour, toil. 

2. One who studies hard. (OED)

"Argeiphantes does not feature much in the works of Benjamin Black, and you can imagine Black knocking back his fourth whiskey of the day, having already churned out a couple of thousand words, leaning back in his chair and saying, 'Banville, you swot.'  Quirke does have a plaster bust of Socrates in his flat, but it was given to him as a joke."

 - Joanna Kavenna, "Pseudonymously Yours: The strange case of Benjamin Black", 11 & 18 July 2011 The New Yorker

Word of the day: roué

The word of the day is roué:

French roué (first half of the 18th cent. with reference to the companions of Philippe II, Duke of Orleans (Regent of France 1715–23), who were said to deserve this punishment; 1780 in more general use; earlier in sense ‘person who has been broken on the wheel’ (1648)), use as noun of past participle of rouer to break on the wheel (early 14th cent. in Middle French) < roue wheel (see row n.³).

A debauched or dissolute man, typically one who is wealthy or aristocratic, and (now) esp. an elderly one; a rake, a libertine, a playboy. (OED)

"He wanders the corridors of a vast sterile mansion or two, feeling 'like a stonyhearted old roué embarrassingly shackled to a lovesick youth,' and signals to successive barmen 'to bring the same again.'"

 - Joanna Kavenna, "Pseudonymously Yours: The strange case of Benjamin Black", 11 & 18 July 2011 The New Yorker, quoting Benjamin Black, A Death in Summer

Word of the day: parp

The word of the day is parp:

Imitative. Compare slightly earlier parp v.

 

Representing a honking sound, esp. that of a horn. (OED)

"Where Banville writes, 'The café.  In the café.  In the café we,' or 'Oh, agog, agog!,' Black writes, 'He crossed the street, dodging a green double-decker bus that parped its horn at him.'"

 - Joanna Kavenna, "Pseudonymously Yours: The strange case of Benjamin Black", 11 & 18 July 2011 The New Yorker

Word of the day: matutinal

The word of the day is matutinal:

Middle French, French matutinal (c1190 in Old French) and its etymon post-classical Latin matutinalis of the morning (5th cent. or earlier), of or relating to matins (c730 in a British source), (as noun) morning psalm or hymn (a543), book of lauds (mid 11th cent.), < classical Latin mātūtīnusmatutine adj. + -ālis-al suffix¹. In sense 2 perhaps after French matinal matinal adj.

Now chiefly literary.

1. Of or relating to the morning, esp. the period just after waking; occurring or performed early or in the morning.

2. Rising early; active or alert in the morning. (OED)

"Many of them sleep on, of course, careless of our cousin Aurora's charming matutinal trick, but there are always the insomniacs, the restless ill, the lovelorn tossing on their solitary beds, or just the early risers, the busy ones, with their knee-bends and their cold showers and their fussy little cups of black ambrosia."

 - John Banville, The Infinities, as quoted by Joanna Kavenna, "Pseudonymously Yours: The strange case of Benjamin Black", 11 & 18 July 2011 The New Yorker