Nabokovian Vocabulary, Part 1
I’ve recently decided to go on a reading spree, kicking through V. Nabokov’s entire long-fiction OEUVRE in a single go. There were two basic impeti (?): 1) I’ve never read an author’s work all at once like that, and it seemed like a cool thing to do (for very small values of “cool”); and 2) Ada, or Ardor is one of the damned finest works I’ve ever read ever ever and I wanted to get me some more of that.
Now, Vladimir is amazing for plenty of reasons, and obnoxious for one major one, which is that he can write better in his second and third languages than I can in my primary. Homeboy is a prose effing stylist. He rules. Ruled. Whatever.
But and so I found myself noting plenty and plenty of words I didn’t know throughout Bend Sinister, which is where by chance I began. I don’t remember the last time I was so thrown by “vocabulary” in a book, but good grief if there weren’t plenty of words about which I was just clueless.
Here they are, yes here they all are, and there will likely be 16 more of these posts before I’m through.
columbarian (I’m guessing is the adjectival form of columbary?)
paletoted (wearing one, I guess)
divigations (can’t find it, maybe an alternate spelling of “divagate”? this works in context)
scholiant (I mean, I can piece this one together, but I can’t find a definition anywhere)
scholium (I cannot read my own writing)
percipient (pretty obvious, in retrospect)
noumenon (having read the definition, I’m still not totally clear)
captious (good word)
