DESOLATION ISLAND, BY PATRICK O’BRIAN

This is my comfort food and travelling companion for the plane ride home. Few friends are so delectable. And after only 30 pages, termagant, “a harsh tempered woman”! I think this might have been on a high school vocab list, but it must have broken free of it’s neuronal prison cell and escaped in the interim. I would search for the little bore hole it left on its way out, but it would only be one of very, very many.

Done

Ah yes, another tasty treat. On to the words!

skein (n): a length of coiled yarn; a tangled situation
megrim (n): a migraine; a whim; depression
inanition (n): exhaustion; a state of emptiness
borborygm (n): a rumble or gurgle produced by gas in the intestines
quadrimane (n): a member of the Quadrumana, a taxon comprising apes and monkeys
concupiscence (n): lust
rattan (n): a kind of climbing palm
lictor (n): a Roman guard who carried fasces (a bundle of rods, not some new kind of poop)
esculent (adj): edible

Also, Stephen, on the merits of cabbage over seal meat:

‘Nonsense,’ said Stephen, ‘it is the most wholesome cabbage I have ever come across in the whole of my career. I hope, Mr Herapath, that you are not going to join in the silly weak womanish unphilosophical mewling and pulling about the cabbage. So it is a little yellow in certain lights, so it is a little sharp, so it smells a little strange: so much the better, say I. At least that will stop the insensate Phaecian hogs from abusing it, as they abuse the brute creation, stuffing themselves with flesh until what little brain they have is drowned in fat. A virtuous esculent! Even its boldest detractors, ready to make the most hellish declarations and to swear through a nine-inch plank that the cabbage makes them fart and rumble, cannot deny that it cured their purpurae. Let them rumble till the heavans shake and resound again; let them fart fire and brimstone, the Gomorrhans, I will not have a single case of scurvy on my hands, the sea-surgeon’s shame, while there is cabbage to be culled.’