Having reading
over twenty H. P. Lovecraft stories and novellas (that’s close to 600
tightly-packed pages of print) in the past seven weeks, I have quickly grown accustomed to the man’s
vocabulary. He likes long, odd-sounding
words, mysterious in exact definition but nonetheless oozing in veiled menace. And they are so weird that they raise red flags
in the brain of the reader (a pleasurable red flag, in my instance), and
whenever I come across one in a story it’s like receiving an email from a
long-lost friend. Words such as these,
for example:
Cyclopean
Eldritch
Rugose
Vertiginous
Fungoid
I love
them! Cyclopean and Eldritch
appear in just about every Lovecraft story, sometimes several times. Rugose,
Vertiginous, and Fungoid in at least fifty percent by my reckoning. These five are just the ones I can recall off
the top of my head, but if I was to do a scholarly computer-driven breakdown of
the man’s work, I’d put Lovecraft’s specialized vocabulary at two dozen
words. Hmm. I may just have to do a follow-up on this post.
Hindoo
and
Esquimaux
Hope no one
takes it as politically-incorrect speech (one never really knows what words are
considered verboten or when), that’s
not the spirit I comment upon them here.
Just that it takes me back to a more rugged, manly (uh-oh!) time and
place, where adventure – and horror – still lay within reach at the farthest of
the four corners of the earth …
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