Sentential Links #41

Wow, I’m up to 41 of these things. Cool! I’m going to do things a little bit differently this week. Over the weekend I found this little article of “Ten More Words You Simply Must Know” (somehow I missed the earlier, “Ten Words You Simply Must Know”). I’m glad to say that I do know all the words in the article, and I even remember a West Wing joke that revolved around one of these words.

Anyhow, since you can’t ever have a vocabulary lesson without giving an example of the word being used sententially, here’s a link to a blog post using each one. While I found the posts simply by using Google’s Blog Search, I did make an effort to choose interesting looking ones, so make sure to click through as always for the proper context!

:: We like to bust up the routine of the postal workers. White envelopes are just abhorrent to the mail artist’s nature.

:: [GAHHH! I’ve just spent fifteen minutes searching, and I can’t find any real blogs that use the word “masticate” unless they’re referring to the exact same vocabulary article I myself am referencing here, which is useless for my purposes. “Masticate” seems to crop up in a whole lot of Spam blogs, though — what’s up with that? Oh well — I have to admit that I’m highly unlikely to start using this word to any degree, especially since “chew” seems to serve the same purpose.]

:: In one way, I want to invert Zukofsky’s paradigm of an integral here, to suggest that, in Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker, the lower limit is surreal, the upper limit real. (I have no idea what this means, actually.)

:: Therefore, the 1955 movie version of the book got twisted into the version that the CIA wanted to disseminate, making Big Brother Capitalism seem better than Big Brother Communism.

:: We must inspire a literature and promulgate a doctrine of our own without any apologies to the powers that be. (This blog is from Cameroon, in Africa.)

:: What shall we say of certain books, which we are assured (for we have not read them) are in their nature so shameful, in their tendency so pestiferous, and contain such rank treason against the royalty of Virtue, such horrible violation of all decorum, that she who can bear to peruse them must in her soul be a prostitute, let her reputation in life be what it will. (By the way: the sample sentence for “pestiferous” given in the “Ten Words” article is an awful sentence. The word is only there to use the word, and it serves no useful purpose that the decriptive stuff in the rest of the sentence doesn’t already serve! This sentence proves that the desire to use big words often backfires, resulting in bad writing. OK, moving on.)

:: I’ve never seen a musician in any genre who is less concerned to draw attention to himself than Steve Gadd, in spite of his playing an instrument which is intrinsically ostentatious. (This post is a very nicely written appreciation of a musician, by the way.)

:: At breakfast this morning, he was regaling us with a tale of Sternutatory Goodness:…. (Tale snipped. Go read, because it’s kind of funny.)

:: Getting close up and personal with a bear can be salutary.

:: Know what’s weird about “Voyager”? On TNG, they have the pugnacious Klingon in charge of the weapons, and the cold, logical robot in charge of the science. On Voyager, they have the cold, logical Vulcan in charge of the weapons, and the pugnacious Klingon as the chief engineer spitting out the technobabble. (Damn — he’s right! I never noticed that!)

Well, that was an interesting exercise. I can’t honestly claim that you must know these words; in fact, a couple of them strike me as being nearly useless. But there you go.

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