The Fabulous Fifth

With a guest at home, I’m swamped with work and to lighten my load in the kitchen, I started looking up for some deals that the local eateries are offering. That is when it struck me – a paradox. Isn’t it paradoxical that we are elated about how much we are saving by spending to avail a deal? Even the receipts of local grocery stores underscore at the end of a long list of purchased items, how much you’ve saved by spending the amount printed inconspicuously beside ‘Subtotal’. Some stores go to quite a length to circle the amount saved and print it in a bigger font to highlight it so much so that your eyes catch that before you realize how much you’ve spent! That’s right, we come across so many paradoxical situations in our everyday life, but this is perhaps the most common one these days and I decided to pen it down in my blog today.

Between paroxysm of laughter and lighter moments with family and guest, I wistfully looked at the 800-page book lying on my pouffe. Joseph Heller has done a stupendous job in Catch-22 and is a must-read for any vocab-enthusiast. The moment I finished my chores I pounced on the pouffe, grabbed the book, and indulged in till late in the night. And it didn't go unrewarded. While paroxysms of laughter and weeping are not uncommon, Chapter 7 of his book, named McWatt, sees the author using it in a fantastic way:

"He was capable of mighty paroxysms of righteous indignation, and he was indignant as could be when he learned that a C.I.D. man was in the area looking for him."

Now, who but these famous authors can come up with such brilliant application!

When I took to blogging, my pivotal drive was documenting my journey of building my vocabulary. A part of the journey involves looking out for words in whatever I read. Inferno by Dan Brown is a notable work. I’ve already watched the action thriller, but even then I feel Dan Brown takes his readers to such an exalted level of experience through his words that reading will remain unrivalled irrespective of how well the seasoned actors portray the fictional characters in the movie. This novel of Dan Brown has the word ‘dolent’ within its first few lines, and this word is redolent of the moments when my son was trying to find his way in the ‘vocabulary’ word. 

He had learnt in his own way that indolent is lazy but when he referred Collins mini dictionary for a rhyming word ‘insolent’, he got trapped in a loop. Meaning of ‘insolent’ was written as ‘impudent’ which he hadn’t heard of before and when he searched up ‘impudent’, he was pointed to ‘impertinent’. That was when he came running to me for help. Finally, I helped him figure out the meaning, and while doing so he picked up so many synonyms of rude. I then suggested him to remember the words together like a chest of drawers, the topmost being the easiest one and each of the following can represent a synonym. While writing a draft, we use the ones in the topmost drawer and while finalising it can’t be imprudent to replace a few with better synonyms from the following drawers! In the years that followed, our paths of learning forked but this continues to be one of my favourite ways of adding words to my chest of drawers! English, however, still tricks me. Check out ‘redolent’ and ‘redolence’ to see what I mean! I always stop by to satiate my olfactory sensations with the sweet redolence of oleander that  adorn our suburb’s station premises.

English is interesting as one word can have multiple meanings that widely vary from each other. If you think that impertinent is opposite to pertinent in a way that 'possible' is to 'impossible', you are only partially correct. Consider this from recent news pertaining to a royal scandal that has avalanched the internet:

“She (Princess Beatrice, daughter of Prince Andrews and Sarah Ferguson and sister of Princess Eugenie) was asking lots of pertinent questions and had her doubts,” the source said. “But by the end of the meeting, she was convinced by the Newsnight team and Amanda Thirsk that they had no choice – that it was the only way to put all the rumours behind them.”

Impertinent is opposite of pertinent when it is used as irrelevant, but impertinent also means rude, even though pertinent doesn’t mean polite!

The last word of today’s post is 'paradigm'. We are familiar with ‘paradigm shift’ – a classic example can be the shift in belief from geocentric to the heliocentric model of our solar system that came along through a feud between science and religion. The use of this word is widespread. However, the standalone word ‘paradigm’ means a typical example or a theoretical framework of any kind. Let me quote this that I gleaned from the web to illustrate a use of the word:

On that day (2^nd April 2012 at UN Headquarters in New York) at the UN, a global movement was launched to create a new economic paradigm – one that has as its goal human happiness and the wellbeing of all life on earth; that recognises as key conditions for the new economy ecological sustainability, fair distribution, and the efficient use of resources; and that requires a healthy balance among thriving natural, human, social, cultural, and built assets.

I’ll be back soon with a trove of special words and their citing in books or web in my next post. If you are reading and have learned a new word from this post or want to share a good one, please feel free to express in the comments. Thank you!