The Sedulous Sixth - What's a Paludarium

I feel elated to reflect on the fact that I'm six-posts old! I never envisaged myself writing even a few lines, but my alacrity to learn new words has driven me thus far. I learn and use and sometimes forget a new word. Documenting them digitally enables me to revisit my creations and in turn, jog my memory.

This holiday season started with a curious gift from a close friend of mine. It was an assorted assembly of succulents in a glass container. I had no idea that it could have a name and it certainly did! It's called a terrarium. Well, with Google at hand, it hardly took any effort to figure out that it's a sort of a sister of our familiar aquarium and that they house mainly plants and sometimes small animals like turtles or ants. On similar lines, the vivarium can contain both animals and plants and a paludarium is a vivarium that consists of both aquatic and terrestrial elements. 

Instantly two images flashed in my mind like matching cards of a memory game. One of them is from a personal trip to a zoo where a crocodile reluctantly swam out of its water tank to bask in the lazy October sun and offer its spectators a rare view. 

The other one was the tank from which the Boa Constrictor communicated with Harry Potter and the readers were introduced officially to the magical capabilities of the boy-who-lived, although a few incidents like growing his hair after a bad haircut, shrinking of a jumper he didn't want to don, and ending up on school building's chimney upon being chased by his porky cousin -  a bully who Harry endured with stoicism, were sprinkled like seasoning to give a flavour of magic prior to the impending magical event in the zoo. That tank had both aquatic and terrestrial elements and each time I watch the movie, I try to recollect all these words!

Now, it's no secret that English bewilders me time and again with its nuances. When my vocabulary was quite feeble, I had explained to my son that 'discourse' is the course that a river takes when it is accosted by obstinate obsidian (read 'rock'). Thankfully I realised immediately that it can't be true as whatever path a sinuous river decides to tread upon is its 'course'. Soon I set my hands on the dictionary to clarify that scintilla of doubt. The meaning couldn't have been more different! Since then, I hardly took any chance to venture and offer a meaning of any word that I haven't heard of before. I realized pretty soon that 'disgorge' isn't any butte, mesa, pinnacle or escarpment that climbs skyward opposite a gorge. 😆

I’ll end this post with three more words. The first one is impiety. Dan Brown has used this in Chapter 83 of Angels and Demons:

And yet, Vittoria knew, for all its impiety and inevitable horror, the task at hand was inescapable.

The sacrilegious task was a fictitious papal autopsy to investigate whether the Pope died of a heart attack or whether he was administered an overdose of Herapin to orchestrate a murder.

The second one is ‘improvise’. I’ve observed people using it often to supplant ‘improve’, but in actuality, it means to perform spontaneously without preparation. In the Order of the Phoenix movie, Harry asks Hermione in the Forbidden Forest what she plans to do with Professor Umbridge, and she replies, ‘Improvising’. This shouldn't be confused with another word that sounds close to it:‘impoverish’. It means render something poor.

The third word is also used at times in a wrong way and hence I decided to pin it to this post. The word is ‘fruition’ and not ‘fruitation’. The word is featured in Chapter 8 of the riveting read of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less by the elegant author Jeffrey Archer:

James arrived carrying a bottle of Beaune Montee Rougue 1971 – even his wine cellar was fast diminishing. He hoped it would last long enough for the plans to come to fruition. Not that he felt an automatic right to a part of the bounty while he failed to contribute his own plan.

Go ahead and read up how a clever twist by Archer enabled James to be rightfully part of the bounty even though he probably never came up with a plan!

With this, I end this post and sign off for quite a while till the end of holidays and I’ll resume around the time of Valentine’s Day of a brand-new year.