I’ve always thought of peril as being a mild sort of trouble – the kind of thing you’d face with your chums before going home for lashings of ginger beer. The variations of perilled and perilling appeared even more benign.
I thought wrong.
Peril actually mean serious and immediate danger.
Don’t know about you, but I’d rather avoid any and all forms of perilousness.
To swish something (a rejection slip perhaps) is to move it through the air, so that it makes a sound. Helpfully my dictionary describes the noise produced as ‘a swishing sound’.
To be magnanimous is to be nobly generous rather than petty in feelings or actions. Hmmm, I do try to behave with magnanimity, but sometimes I get annoyed and fail to react magnanimously.
Do you like this word? It’s a bit of a tongue mangler, isn’t it? Decidedly tricky to illustrate too.
Umm… Aha! If someone who’d annoyed me fell into the sea I’d probably be magnanimous enough to throw them a life bouy – if I didn’t have to go far to find one and I wasn’t busy or anything.
A tribulation is a great affliction or oppression, or the cause of that. The occupants of many abbeys suffered tribulations during the reformation ordered by Henry VIII.
It’s a good thing I looked it up before using it anywhere as I’d always imagined it meant a minor source of annoyance. Perhaps I was associating it with trivial?
Did you know what the word meant?
To rootle is to dig with a snout, to poke about or search. Whilst you’re doing it you’re rootling and afterwards you’ll have rootled.
Somewhere I have a photo of pigs rootling, but when I rootled through my hard drive I got distracted, so here are some steps instead. Do you know where they are? Have you climbed them?
What were you looking for last time you rootled – and did you find it?
Estimation is the process or result of making an estimate, an opinion or judgement of worth, or an old term for esteem.
By my estimation it’s time for another plug for my books. You’d all go up in my estimation if you bought one 😉 (perhaps one of these which are currently reduced to 99p / 99c) Same applies if you read it on Kindle Unlimited, or borrow it from the library …
The word keep has a variety of meanings.
To keep is to retain or preserve – I keep food fresh by keeping it in the fridge. Or it can mean detain or prevent – Don’t let reading this blog keep you from writing. Or to guard or protect – keep yourself safe on the internet by keeping your passwords secret. It’s also part of a castle!
There are other uses for the word, but I’m not going to keep on typing as that’s kept me away from my stories long enough. Maybe some of you would like to keep on with the definitions or examples?
Tantamount, which is almost always followed by ‘to’ means equivalent.
Clicking on my blog is tantamount to agreeing to see more of my photos!
Staffage is the visual arts equivalent of minor characters in a novel. They’re animals or people in the background. Part of the scene, but not the subject.
As I can’t draw, I’m attempting to illustrate this through photos of a crow. In one he’s the central character, the subject – in the other he’s really just staffage. See what I mean?
A hobbledehoy is a clumsy or awkward youth. I was one of them a loooong time ago, though I don’t recall being referred to as such.
Is there a term for a similar adult? If so, that’ll be me now.