Saturday, February 21, 2009

New words learned recently

this week:


Seriatim:  One after another. in series.  As used in Annie Dillard's Essay "The Wreck of Time":
"What were you doing on April 30, 1991, when a series of waves drowned 138,000 people?  Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heart-breaking news?  Who told you?  What, seriatim, were your sensations?  Who did you tell?  Did you weep?  Did your anguish last days or weeks?"

Euonymus:  it refers to a certain type of plant.  From wikipedia: "The spindles, genus Euonymus, comprise about 170-180 species of deciduous and evergreen shrubs and small trees. They live mostly in East Asia, including the Himalayas,[1] and they also have a distribution in Europe, Asia, Australasia, North America and Madagascar."

As listed on seattle.craigslist.org/zip today: "Healthy Euonymous shrub about 6' tall (plant on left in photo). Good for yard border or in combination with other shrubs. It has become too large for my small front yard. 
Easy root system to dig up and move."

Also learned recently--an acronym:  STFU.  As seen in a poster with these letters which came up in a google search for "What's the point?"  I'm not going to tell you what that one means, as it seem fairly self explanatory.

Probably people who do google searches like that have too much time on their hands.


1 comment:

JadeEJF said...

I was inordinately excited to see that you'd read the essay. Like I said before, I need to check back on my comments more often! I drop them into other peoples' posts, and unfortunately Blogger doesn't e-mail me when there are responses like LJ does, so I totally forget... but I'm glad you read it!

And learning new words is never a bad thing. I'll have to go give further thoughts on the last post :)