Wondrous Words Wednesday

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Kathy at Bermudaonion. The idea is for bloggers to post about the unfamiliar words they have encountered in their reading the past week. Click over to read other book bloggers’ Wondrous Words, and leave a link to your post of some Wondrous Words of your own.

All of my words today come from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

calcareous: 1 a: resembling calcite or calcium carbonate especially in hardness; b: consisting of or containing calcium carbonate; also: containing calcium; 2: growing on limestone or in soil impregnated with lime

The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed through.

tincture: 1: to tint or stain with a color: tinge; 2: a: to infuse or instill with a property or entity:impregnate; b:to imbue with a quality:affect

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.

I love this description of Tess!

conterminous: 1 : having a common boundary: 2 : coterminous; 3 : enclosed within one common boundary

The mute procession past her shoulders of trees and hedges became attached to fantastic scenes outside reality and the occasional heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense sad soul, conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in time.

pollarded: : to make a pollard of (a tree)

Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man, grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows.

mistarsher: mustache

“Mother, why did our grand relation keep on putting his hand up to his mistarshers?”