Thursday, March 13, 2014

Vocabulary of Horrorishness


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.

As a post-script, let me add that I love the anachronistic way he spells

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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