Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Kathy aka Bermuda Onion where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading. Feel free to join in the fun.LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN by Colum McCann
pabulum - I felt the urge to tell Blaine that I had in fact spent my whole life really loving the Nixon boy in the wheelchair, and that it had all been pabulum since then, and juvenile, and useless, and tiresome, all of our art, all our projects, all our failures, it was just pure cast-off, and none of it mattered, but instead I just sat there, saying nothing, listening to the faint hum of voices from the counter, and the rattle of the forks against the plates. (p. 134)
pabulum: material for "insipid" intellectual nourishment
What new words did you discover this week?
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8 comments:
I thought I knew the meaning of that word, but I was totally wrong - I thought it was baby food! Thanks for playing along.
Me too - definitely sounds like something to eat! LOL
Make that three of us. I wondered why there was a u after pab. But I like this new word of pabulum. I'm going to see if I can use that one as my own.
This is a good one. I've heard this definition just not this spelling.
rhi·zome (rī′zōm′)
noun
a creeping stem lying, usually horizontally, at or under the surface of the soil and differing from a root in having scale leaves, bearing leaves or aerial shoots near its tips, and producing roots from its undersurface
From the book Witchgrass: A Pipe Dream (page 1) by Dave Wilkinson.
I like that word!
As a writer, I am always mortified that there are still many many words I don't know. This is a great one. I love that you and Kathy do this! xo
Bermudaonion, you're not wrong! Here's the definition:
pabulum
"food," 1678, from L. pabulum "fodder, food," from PIE base *pa- "to protect, feed" (see food) + instrumentive suffix *-dhlom. Pablum (1932), derived from this, is a trademark (Mead Johnson & Co.) for a soft, bland cereal used as a food for weak and invalid people, hence fig. use (attested from 1970, first by U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew) in ref. to "mushy" political prose.
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