An alpinist is a climber of high mountains (generally, but not necessarily the Alps). I’m not an alpinist.

I don’t know if there’s a word for climbers of not very high mountains, only when it’s sunny, the path doesn’t look too treacherous and regular stops are permitted, but if there is, I’m one of them.

Specious means either misleadingly attractive or superficially plausible, but actually wrong.

Custard made with salt instead of sugar would add speciosity to your trifle. An example of speciousness is the specious claim that as chocolate is dervived from plants, a family sized bar of Aero counts as one of your five a day. That’s only true if you choose the orange flavoured one (she adds speciously*)

*mint’s a plant, so green centred Aeros are healthy too.

A monticule is a small hill. Sounds rather friendly, doesn’t it? The sort of place you’d walk up to enjoy a picnic involving ginger beer and home made cake. A monticule can also be a mini mound caused by a volcano.

Here’s the view from a hill (quite a big one) I climbed up one summer. Recognise it?

Clue … instead of climbing up, you could just swan about down the bottom.

Umbriferous means providing shade.
The depth of Lydford Gorge would make it a pleasantly shady place to walk in summer, even without the umbriferous canopy of vegetation.

I hope to keep this post compendious, that is comprehensive yet fairly brief. To write so compendiously would demonstrate my compendiousness, which would be nice.

Cakes are also nice (and round here they’re comprehensively dealt with in a very brief time).

Fatalism can mean either a submissive attitude to events as being inevitable, or the belief that everything is predetermined and that we have no influence over anything which may happen. A fatalist is a person who thinks fatalistically.

I’m not a fatalist. Some things are out of our control, and luck plays a part, but I believe that it’s generally possible for us to influence the future.

What about you?