Joyfully Retired

Many thanks to Kathy/Bermuda Onion for gathering us together weekly to share the words we’ve discovered in our reading this week. I found several while reading the daily serialized novel of Alexander McCall Smith – The Dog Who Came in From the Cold.

1. treacle: Five minutes in my brother’s company and I’m already wading in a morass of intellectual treacle.

Treacle means: British term for molasses OR a figurative cloying sentimentality or flattery.

2. specious: The owner was puzzled, until the realisation dawned: her customers were buying the dresses purely in order to wear them to Sunday brunches and lunches at friends’ houses before returning them for specious reasons later in the afternoon.

Specious means superficially plausible, but actually wrong.

I can always count on fellow bloggers for new-to-me words. Here’s one from Cathy at Kittling: Books:

3.  verisimilitude: The customs of the native peoples, how the whites lived and behaved, the landscape, the weather, the architecture… all of these things brought such verisimilitude to the book that I would rank The Witch Doctor’s Wife right up there with Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Stanley.

verisimilitude means the appearance of being true or real : the detail gives the novel some verisimilitude.

It’s so much fun to look for and track down new words. How about you? Did you find any new words this week?