D. A. Hosek

I happened in one day to come across the words “susurrus” and “susurrate” in two different books (Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Tom McCarthy’s C). Finding the coincidence delightful, I went home and told my wife about the new word(s) I had learned.

“Ahh, sussurate,” she whispered. It took me a while to realise that my wife, the non-native English speaker, knew a word I had just learned. Silly me, forgetting that all these wonderfully obscure Latinate words in English are basic vocabulary in Spanish.

I’m always conscious of the words that appear in the books I read, looking for those words which I don’t know. I’ve had the word “divagate” in my list of interesting words for a while, long enough that I forget where it came from. I found two definitions for the word. A literal meaning of “to wander or drift about” and a more figurative meaning of “to ramble or digress.” I suspect that it was the latter term that I found this word meaning in my reading, but since my list of words omits their sources (an error I’ll need to correct), I can’t say for certain.

I’m always on the lookout for new words, opportunities to push the boundaries of my vocabulary, so when I encountered the word “girning” in an A. S. Byatt short story, I had to make a note of this one. In the context, it was a whining or complaining sound (made, in this case by a dog), and was something that I found to be a familiar concept, having a dog who is apt to girn. But there’s another meaning to this as well: To girn also means to make faces and “girning” can refer to a competition in which the competitors make silly faces while framed by a horse collar. It seems a wonderful sort of diversion.