Vocablog: umbrageous

umbrageous, adj.

Of a thing, shady; of a person, easily offended.

(Found in Charlotte Brontë's Villette.)

Usage example: I walked through umbrageous alleys, dodging umbrageous men.

Vocablog: megrim, megrims

megrim, megrims, n.

In the singular (megrim), a bad headache or migraine; in the plural (megrims), depression or melancholy.

(Found in George Eliot's Middlemarch.)

Usage example: Recent news about the trade deficit has given many economists the megrims. I don't have a head for numbers, though, so trying to understand it all gives me a megrim.

Other useful forms: megrimical, adj.; megrimish, adj.

Vocablog: tumulous

tumulous, adj.

Heaped up; mound-like.

(Found in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.)

Usage example: She waited so long to clean her dishes that tumulous towers of teacups spread across the kitchen.

Vocablog: flagitious

flagitious, adj.

Wicked; drawn to evil or criminal behavior.

(Found in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.)

Usage example: You didn't accidentally lose my iPod--you stole it, you flagitious dog.

Vocablog: velleity

velleity, n.

A will or desire that is never acted upon; an idle wish.

(Found in the Kaufman translation of Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals.)

Usage example: He talked about becoming a famous chef, but he never once entered a kitchen--it was less a goal than a velleity.

Vocablog: peculation

peculation, n.

Taking money that is being held in trust for another; embezzlement.

(Found in Anthony Trollope's The Warden.)

Usage Example: Everyone thought Bernie Madoff was engaged in financial speculation, but not peculation.

Vocablog (An Explanation)

Studying literature, especially older literature, often means coming across words you aren't familiar with. I jot these words just inside the covers of the books I'm reading, and all-too-often forget to look them up later--which has led to a massive backlog of interesting words whose meanings I don't know.

One regular feature of Nifty Rictus will be a Vocablog--a chance to look back over these words and find out what they mean. There are plenty of "Word of the Day" Internet modules out there, but in my experience they tend to generate words that are either too basic ("deluge") or too esoteric ("zooxanthellae")--you get the sense that people are pulling the words from dictionaries and science textbooks, not from actual usage. The Vocablog will try to steer a happy medium between these two extremes, focusing on unusual words that are usable by virtue of having actually been used at some point in the not-so-distant past.