Welcome back to Learning New Words with Lymond, in which I
blog my way through The Game of Kings, the first book of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, a series of six novels which follow the career and (mis)fortunes of a fictional Scottish nobleman, Francis Crawford of Lymond. Described on the back of my copy as "a scapegrace of crooked felicities and murderous talents, possessed of a scholar's erudition and a tongue as wicked as rapier," Lymond, to those of us who love him, is one of those characters who moves into our minds and never moves out, the standard by which all clever, beautiful, morally complex, multi-talented protagonists are judged and (often) found wanting. Dunnett is one of those authors I feel barely coherent about, I love her so much. The characters are great, but the writing--ah, the writing! What can I possibly say about the writing? It is baroque, playful, savage, and almost always above my head. I love it so.
In these posts, I aim to learn from Dunnett's use of rare and obscure words. What do these words mean? Why do they make sense in context? How do they enhance our understanding and enjoyment of what is happening in the story? I hope this provides me--and any fellow Dunnett fans who stumble on these posts--two opportunities.
- To improve my vocabulary! I want to be able to imitate the depth and complexity I admire in older writing in my own work. One way to do this is to learn new words.
- To bask in the
beauty and complexity of Dunnett's writing.
This occasional series wends its through the alphabet from A to Z.
We continue with words beginning with the letter 'c'...
cacodemon
Credit the boy with more strength of mind than a newly gutted lamp-wick. Or are you maybe not so much worried about Will as anxious to put a bit of rope around the yellow-headed cacodemon's neck? p 165
From the Greek, κακοδαίμων, an evil genius (noun or adjective). In English, from the late sixteenth century, a noun meaning "evil spirit". From the early nineteenth century onward, the word was also also used in a medical context to refer to nightmares. In astrology, it is "the Twelfth House (or Scheme) in a figure of the Heavens, so called from its baleful signification." This last use is seventeenth century but too fun not to include. (OED.) Wat Buccleuch is the speaker here; unlike Lymond himself, his speech is typically rather plain, if peppered with lots of Scots dialect. This is a rare and delightful bit of recherché wordplay for him.
calcination, cibation
Calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation, cibation, sublimation, fermentation, exaltation, multiplication, and projection," chanted Johnnie, his dark face ferociously solemn. "These and none others are the twelve processes." p. 326
Calcination is "the
action or process of calcining; reduction by fire to a ‘calx’, powder,
or friable substance; the subjecting of any infusible substance to a
roasting heat." It can also be used as a synonym for processes which produce similar results. More broadly, it can also simply refer to burning something to ashes. Lastly, it can be something in "a calcined condition" or "that which has been calcined, a calcined product or ‘calcinate’". It comes from the Classical Latin noun calcinātio which became the Medieval Latin verb calcināre. (OED)
While calcination became a word widely used outside of alchemy, cibation seems to have stayed firmly inside of it. It's defined as the "name of the seventh process, ‘feeding the matter’". And of course, it comes seventh on Johnnie Bullo's list, as a demonstration that, like any good conman, he knows enough to convince. Cibation can also simply refer to "taking food, feeding." In the process of looking up words, it's the first one I've seen that is simply marked as "obsolete", with no statistics given on the frequency of its use. (OED)
calyx
The empty calyx he was attacking made infinitesimal efforts to avoid him; to refuse his services; to deny his proximity; but he persevered. Hatred was life; shame was life; humiliation was life; the trivial movements Lymond was making in his extremity were life. Richard Crawford was a very stubborn man. p. 456
A word from seventeenth century botany for the green leaves which cover a flower bud before it blooms, which can also be applied to similar parts of other living things. The etymology is worth quoting in full
Latin calyx, < Greek κάλυξ outer covering of a fruit, flower, or bud; shell, husk, pod, pericarp (from root of καλύπτειν to cover). In medieval Latin and in the Romanic languages, this word has run together in form with the much commoner Latin word calix ‘cup, goblet, drinking vessel’; and the two are to a great extent treated as one by modern scientific writers, so that the calyx of a flower is commonly explained as the ‘flower-cup’, and the form calyx and its derivatives are applied to many cup-like organs, which have nothing to do with the calyx of a flower, but are really meant to be compared to a calix or cup. (OED)
If you are a normal, sane person, you may here be wondering,
if she meant cup why didn't she just say that? Vessel would also do! But there is something so elegant, so fragile, about the word
calyx that cup or vessel just doesn't cover. Lymond, in this scene, is at his lowest point--severely injured, he has made a fruitless effort to escape the care of the elder brother who isn't sure whether he wants to save him or kill him or save him so he can kill him.
When I first read the Lymond books, I was younger than the protagonist, and I imprinted on him much the same way I did as a teenager encountering the figure of Peter Wimsey for the first time. He was captivating. All his wrongs could be justified. Rereading it now, almost a decade older than Lymond, it is Richard Crawford's unflashy, inflexible, uncompromising decency, that draws me in.
canescent
To the French, dropping like canescent frost on the discreet slopes about Haddington, it was a small, acute campaign ordered by His Most Christian Majesty out of a fine warm regard for Scotland and a need to spit in the Protector's other eye. p. 451
Another word that comes from Latin; in this case, the present participle, cānēscentem of of the verb cānēscere, to grow hoary. The OED defines it as "Rather hoary; greyish or dull white, like the down or hairs on the leaves of plants", but provides only one citation of it in use, from a dictionary published in 1847. It occurs approximately 0.01 times per million words in modern English, leaving me to once again reflect on how reading Dorothy Dunnett is like winning the rare-word lottery. This is another one to bring back, especially since it sounds so close to something that ought to mean "shiny", and doesn't.
cappers
The fleshers and brewers and smiths and weavers and skinners and saddlers and salters and cappers and masons and cutlers and fletchers and plasterers and armourers and porters and water carriers, and the one-eye man who had called at Bogle House selling fumigating pans. p. 138
"Duh!" I exclaimed to myself when I looked this one up. A capper is just an old word for a cap-maker. By the early nineteenth century, this seems to have fallen out of use, and other uses, including an accomplice in a game of chance or rigged auction, came to predominate. (OED) Someone tell Scott Lynch, it's a word that would suit his Gentlemen Bastards series splendidly.
caracole
And, rising in the saddle, Lennox's men with whoops and cracking of whips cantered down the road towards the hill; and the herd, after much eye-rolling and heavy breathing and ponderous caracole, heaved itself around and trotted back the way it had--supposedly--come. The citizens of Cumberland gambolled after it. p. 200
As a noun, this is a turn or wheel to the right, executed on horseback. It's a borrowing from French to refer specifically to wheeling left and right in a zigzag course; it's also a verb, meaning to execute caracol(e)s, or more generally "to caper about". This is the first word I've seen where the dictionary-makers permitted themselves the luxury of snark. "Many writers have used the word without any clear notion of its meaning". (OED) And while Dunnett is describing the movement of a herd of stolen cattle and sheep, not horsemen, the word perfectly captures the nature of their movement. This is one of my favourite scenes in the book, not least because it showcases Lymond's brilliance as a strategist, Will Scott's growing maturity, and several characters (among them my beloved Richard Crawford) completely losing their tempers.
carking
"Then you supposed wrong," said Lymond shortly. "I've had a damned carking afternoon. A Moslem would blame my Ifrit, a Buddist explain the papingo was really my own great-grandmother, and a Christian, no doubt, call it the vengeance of the Lord. As a plain, inoffensive heathen, I call it bloody annoying." p. 160
From context, one would guess that this means "irritating", but it actually means something more like distressing, wearing, toiling, or anxious. (OED) Lymond when thwarted tends to resort to parallel syntax and learned references as a means of relieving his feelings, which is immensely entertaining.
catafalque
From his low and castellated rampart he caught a glimpse of a yellow head. He raised himself higher. At the same moment Lymond stepped back before Lennox, who was shouting abuse: this brought him halfway along the table with his right side to the balcony and the catafalque with Acheson on his left. p. 430
Oh, this is a good one! A catafalque is a stage or platform built to hold a coffin or effigy, or a temporary wooden structure used in funeral ceremonies to represent a tomb or cenotaph. (OED) Here, it seems to be used as a straightforward synonym for tomb. Dunnett never uses a one-syllable word where polysyllables will do; though table and tomb have a nice parallelism, there's the significant fact that Acheson is not (yet) dead, so the fact that he is lying on a structure that only represents a tomb is perfect.
catalysis
Babies bounced and abounded in the Scott household; babies with mouths round and adhesive as lampreys; babies like Pandean pipes, of diminishing size and resonant voices; babies rendering torture and catalysis among the animate, the inanimate and the comatose. The Buccleuchs themselves were totally immune. p 163
A word derived from the Greek κατάλυσις, meaning dissolution. Used in seventeenth century English to mean "dissolution, destruction, ruin", a usage which is now rare if not obsolete (it's now mostly used as a synonym for a process in chemistry that also goes by the name of contact action). OED
cataphract
So he quoted Latin, and Lymond, breaking painfully from his numb cataphract, retaliated. p. 522
Literally, armour or a coat of mail, or a soldier in full armour. (OED) Here, Lymond's armour is figurative--Henry Lauder is the one person in Game of Kings who gives Lymond a fair fight in a battle of wits. If I have to rank my favourite scenes in the novel Lymond's trial is definitely near the top. Why? The descriptions of how Lymond speaks. They are an absolute masterclass in the impact of a few well-chosen words.
Casuistry
What are we discussing, a test case in casuistry or my personal complexity of habits? p. 210
Conversations between Lymond and Will Scott always delight; this is a particularly good one. Casuistry is "The science, art, or reasoning of the casuist; that part of Ethics which
resolves cases of conscience, applying the general rules of religion
and morality to particular instances in which ‘circumstances alter
cases’, or in which there appears to be a conflict of duties. Often (and
perhaps originally) applied to a quibbling or evasive way of dealing
with difficult cases of duty; sophistry." (OED)
chabouk
In that case she's probably in the room at the end of the passage with a chabouk. Or is it locked? p. 368
Sometimes spelled chawbuck, this is simply a horsewhip, coming from
chābuk, which is the word for horsewhip in both Persian and Urdu. (
OED) Philippa Somerville--the she of this passage--really does not like Lymond.
chatoyant
The familiar, chatoyant glint was in Lymond's eyes. p. 173
Oh, let's bring this one into wider usage! Have you ever wanted for a single word to describe the look of a cat's eye glowing in the dark, or a light that has a similar quality? Mostly, this is an adjective "having a changeable, undulating, or floating lustre, like that of a cat's eye in the dark," but it is occasionally also used as a noun, referring directly to this sort of lustre itself. French-speakers may already know this one--it's a direct lift from that language. OED
chiel
Jamie! Tell me! Ye havena had an encoonter with a sleekit-spoken chiel...p 223
A Scots word for "any man without reference to age; a lad, fellow, chap. Frequently used contemptuously or affectionately." OED
chub
When you know the art of living, you don't look for death, or half-death; you don't hide in a hole like a chub. p. 272
A chub is "a river fish (
Cyprinus or
Leuciscus cephalus)
of the Carp family (Cyprinidæ), also called the Chevin. It is a thick
fat coarse-fleshed fish, of a dusky green colour on the upperparts and
silvery-white beneath, frequenting deep holes, especially about the
roots of trees, and in warm weather rising near the surface."
OED. This comes from a conversation between Lymond and Margaret, Countess of Lennox, and it sets up an absolute wrecking ball of a simile four pages later.
cobalt
How may a breed freshen except under mutation? How improve its whiteness, except by admitting a rogue cobalt to its meadows? p. 540
One of the fun things about paying attention to rare and unusual words is discovering completely new meanings of words I already know well. I know cobalt as a deep, rich blue but that doesn't make sense in the context of the passage, which comes from a scene where Sybilla, Lymond's mother, thinks about the fate of her three children in terms of a nursery rhyme about lambs. Cobalt here seems to refer to a sheep the colour of the raw metal itself, which is silvery-white. Contextually, I thought it might be a specific type of sheep, but it doesn't seem to be, although, in the most stunning example of a false friend I have yet found in this project, sheep and cattle do suffer from cobalt deficiency.
cobble
Her friends and contemporaries of church and nobility, the suitors of the Court of Session, the powerful of both sexes at Court, had all felt the impact of the Dowager's fear, and many of them had tried to help because she was Sybilla, and people would lend her a needle to cobble the moon to her gates if she asked for it. p. 540
I can't help but think there's a specific literary reference hiding here but I am unable to find it. Cobbling (mending or joining roughly or clumsily--OED) the moon to a gate isn't the first thing that springs to mind as a metaphor for an impossible task but that's clearly how it is here being used.
colletic
If he had expired in a paste of perspiration, nobody would have noticed. The colletic stare of guards and Englishmen alike was on the sweating, subsaltive hands and on the grinning tarots: the impious Papess, the lascivious Lover, the jeering Fool. p. 521
And in looking this one up in the dictionary, we learn a new polsyllabic word for glue (agglutinant); the word itself is an adjective meaning "having the property of joining as with glue." (OED) Isn't it great? Saying their stares were glued on the cards and the hands of the players slows the sentence down; saying only that the audience stared doesn't convey the intensity with which they watched. The tarot game keeps climbing to the top of my list of favourite Game of Kings scenes.
concamerate
But I prefer my truth flat and not concamerate, even with the most dulcet spring of famous rhetoric in spate beneath. p. 522
A rare verb, meaning to arch or to vault, or to set in an arch or a vault (another meaning is "to divide into chambers"). (OED) The adjectival form in the dictionary is concamerated. Concamerate appears in the rarest of OED's frequency bands, which are words that appear fewer than 0.001 times per million words. They are typically highly specialized technical vocabulary; concamerate is an architectural term.
contes
The men watching, unable to breathe, heard the click and clash and slither of contes, froissèes, beating and binding: saw first one man and then the other bring his art to the pitch of freeing his blade for the ultimate perfection, only to bow before the other's defence. p. 419
From context, this is clearly a term for a specific move in fencing, but even attempting to search for "contes, froissèes, beating and binding" stumps Google altogether. Trying to find "contes" on fencing websites is fruitless; in our text-matching world, one is simply directed to pages containing the words "contest" or "contestant", or, if searching for the singular, "content." Eheu, but raise a glass to Dorothy Dunnett's local librarian, who must surely have passed that rare book on medieval swordplay around the break room when it came in for her favourite patron.
corium
"It isn't quite conscience so much as horrified admiration," said Lymond. "From cuticle to corium in four days." p. 379
Corium is "the true skin or derma under the epidermis" (OED), a word which the dictionary thinks is nineteenth century, though the earliest examples of cuticle, the outer layer of the skin (dermis), is seventeenth. Would someone in 1547 or thereabouts have known the skin had inner and outer layers? Let's not worry about that, and instead delight in a marvelously toothsome way to say someone has gotten under your skin.
corybantic
The argument became corybantic and public; it blared; it stopped. p.166
"Of, pertaining to, or resembling the Corybantes or their rites". (OED) We then have to chase down the word Corybant, who is "a priest of the Phrygian worship of Cybele, which was performed with noisy and extravagant dances." (OED) Janet and Wat Buccleuch argue as one of their love languages, but I love how this silly word for loud hints that their argument is somewhat staged, or at least performative.
corymb
There was no room left to stand and no air to inhale, but the light beat down on a swaying corymb of heads, and shone on necks craning with a nervous, avid tension like beasts at a water hole. p. 533
A corymb is "a cluster of ivy-berries or grapes"; but here, it seems to be used in its botanical sense, of a raceme where lower flower-stalks are proportionally longer than upper ones, so all the flowers appear at the same height (something like a stalk of baby's breath in a floral bouquet, perhaps). (
OED)
cribble
You may set fire to churches and cribble empires through your bloody fingers, but the one irretrievable mistake is to misjudge a fellow human being. p. 324
A lovely old word for "to pass through a sieve, to sift". (OED). I love the alliteration of "churches" and "cribble"; I love even more what Lymond's interactions with the Somerville family (he's speaking here to Gideon Somerville) reveal about his character, flaws, and motivations.
cushats
The cushats had long since returned sidling to their roosts. As stillness fell, they settled too, with frilled feathers and the rasp of dry feet. p. 438
A Scots or northern English word for wood pigeons or ring doves. Which could be gathered from the fact that Lymond and his brother are in a dovecote and the birds have come back, but it's fun to learn that the word comes directly from Old English. (OED)
Because I work at a university, I have access to the Oxford
English Dictionary, and indeed the entire Oxford Reference series of
dictionaries and encyclopedias. It is a principle of this blog to try
to use and link to sources that anyone can access, but the OED has
features--like the ability to explore the etymology, frequency, history
of use, and meanings of words, that free online dictionaries simply
don't have. My plan is to quote relevant bits of entries, and to include
open access links wherever possible, so that anyone who wants to do so
can geek out with me, paywalls be damned.
