At 1083 pages, it took me more than a just few days to read Peter Ackroyd’s epic-length biography, Dickens.  Actually I would have completed it much more quickly had I not stopped to look up so many words!  Some I just wanted to make sure I knew the exact meaning of – but there were several words in Dickens which I am fairly sure I had NEVER laid eyes on before in my entire life!  In many portions of the book, I had to research words at the rate of about one per page.  About a third of the way through, just for fun, I began to highlight each word that I looked up.  Following are some of those.  How many could you precisely define – without looking?!  As Count Rugin in “The Princess Bride” exhorted Wesley: “This is for posterity, so be honest!”    

— alembic  (we’ll start with an “a” …)

— lachrymose

— threnody  (Ackryod made use of this one several times; much to my credit, I only had to look it up the first two! 😉

— simulacrum  (You can figure this one out!)

— railroad  (No, wait, I did know that one … )

— soporific  (what I need tonight   Maybe this blog will be that for you! 😉

— factotum  (reminded me somewhat of Taticorum from Little Dorrit …)

— lugubrious

— opprobrium (I actually knew that one too, but I thought I would throw it in and see if you did …)

— detritus  (Ackryod used word this again in the next page, and by golly I knew it THAT time!)

— paroxysm  (oh, yeah, I knew that …)

— catarrh  (don’t look it up; it’s gross …)

— perfervid  (I guess this could be almost as bad as it sounds …)

— plorn  (ok, don’t look that one up either; that was mean. It isn’t a word; it was the Dickens family’s nickname for his youngest son)

— desuetude

— gloire  (si vous parlez francais, c’est tres simple!)

— plangent   

— seigneurial (foreign language helps here too – I had never seen this word before, but deduced its meaning from its Romantic language root and the context)

— peroration  (I SHOULD have deduced this one much the same way )

— chiaroscuro (yep, that’s what it says … I really need to memorize this one so I can impress an eavesdropping high brow in an art museum)

— picaresque (NO, not “picturesque”!!)

— cloaca (you had to read it in context …)

OK, so there weren’t quite as many as I had remembered.  Maybe that’s not too bad after all for over 1000 pages.  To me it seemed like I was constantly looking up words on my iPhone.  But what about you — will you be truthful, before God and man — how many can you define, without looking them up?  (We’ll toss “railroad” and “Plorn” — how many out of 20?!) 

 I don’t think I will be using these in a sermon any time in the near future (or maybe I should — just to see looks on some of their faces!) but I just MIGHT have found some good vocabulary words for a home school assignment for our 13-year-old son Michael here pretty soon (as if he’s not hard enough to understand sometimes!)