Here we go again, round two! A panoply of fresh and funky vocabulary from our favorite intellectuals. Last week, it was Jack Kerouac On the Road. This week, Aldous Huxley Brave New World. Take a breath now, this list is long: 22 words. Yikes!
As a side note, I’ve actually decided that Huxley looks a heck of a lot like my great great grandpa. Check this out: My elder on the left, Huxley on the right. Resemblance?
Anyway, as stated vocabulary is the key to, at the very least, sounding like a great writer. So, here’s this week’s list:
Vocabulary Improvement Practices
You can do it! Here’s the very simple procedure:
1. Make flashcards and study, study, study!
2. Take Quiz #2 here. Remember, you have to pass Level 1 to move on the Level 2. Also keep in mind that we are building here 10 words at a time. So, this quiz incorporates some of the word list from last week as well.
3. Write a short story incorporating the words. Another note: this story can be as mundane or outlandish as you want. The idea is to go where ever your mind goes. Let the words flow.
Here’s mine: Over the Hills of May
Behind the venerable Hills of May, squalid back banks housed broken down ships abandoned in surreptitious night crawls made by sea captains who had entirely—at one point or another—lost their minds. The ocean has a way of doing that to people: once scrupulous, the tide turns them, the current rocks them, the wind and sun and salt dry out their inexorable, yet sinking idiosyncrasies, and then they wash up on shore looking for their land legs. For those boisterous sailors who crawled across the Hills of May, the ignominy of being on one’s knees was insurmountable and unable to be recapitulated. Something indignant on those hills above the back banks was buried in clandestine ceremony.
At the Red Hook, whenever a sailor cried, which was often, bartenders implored them to find their legs elsewhere, the usual Friday night crowd satiated with their sonorous pleas to bring up the boats.
“But they’re still down there,” shouted Lawrence T.K. Aldrich in effusive gasps. He often stumbled through the doors of the Red Hook to make indignant claims and with a heretical shifting of weight, everyone looked the other way. “They’re still down there!”
He was not the only one who heard the voices of lost seamen shouting out over the Hills of May.
Ernest Bulk heard them too, but he was a quiet man not akin the subversive nature of sailors. When bar guests began the jaunty dances of midnight, Ernest Bulk scoffed at their callow movements—the reaching for each other, the stumbling, the intoxicated sways—and headed home with his journal in hand. They looked to him more shipwrecked than the ghosts that haunted the harbor. On his way past the hills and the harbor he heard the ghosts’ odious derision.
“Fools! Bring us back!”
They did not know they had docked long ago. That the war had ended. That the Hills of May, satiated by battle, expressed languor the years of fighting by letting their cries roll off the back banks and echo through town, through the Red Hook, though Ernest Bulk’s dreams.
Lawrence T.K. Aldrich heard them, but his cries on their behalf at the Red Hook were ignored as obliquity. Only Ernest paid attention to him, but he remained quiet. Had Lawrence T.K. Aldrich not disappeared at sea 200 years ago, perhaps he’d have spoken for him and for the other lost souls of the back bay. But that was not the case.