4 June 2015

• Inordinate: Not within proper or reasonable limits; immoderate; excessive; unrestrained in conduct, feelings etc.  
• I am a little tired of all the apologies, and qualifications that hover around translation. Sure, it requires an inordinate supply of humility. (Peter Cole)
• Scads: A large quantity of anything
• Josh died of a heroin overdose when Mann was just 13, leaving behind a big, unfulfilled ambitions and scads of self-castigating notebooks. (Joe Fessler) 
• Angst: A feeling of dread, anxiety, or anguish
• When I first encountered J.R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip, I was in a particularly angsty phase of my graduate-school career.(Joe Fessler)
• Wince: To draw back or tense the body, as from pain or from a blow; start; flinch
• I winced each time someone found out my chosen genre and asked me, with a sneer, "Oh, so what horrible event brought you here?"(Joe Fessler)
• Sneer: To smile. laugh, or contort the face in a manner that shows scorn or contempt
• I winced each time someone found out my chosen genre and asked me, with a sneer, "Oh, so what horrible event brought you here?"(Joe Fessler)
• Maudlin: Tearfully or weakly emotional; foolishly sentimental
• But as I wrote about baseball and about my family, two topics that can easily verge into the maudlin or the insular, I faced more than literally self doubt-I exhausted myself questioning whether the things I cared about were worth care in the first place. (Joe Fessler)
• Insular: Detached; standing alone; isolated
• But as I wrote about baseball and about my family, two topics that can easily verge into the maudlin or the insular, I faced more than literally self doubt-I exhausted myself questioning whether the things I cared about were worth care in the first place. (Joe Fessler)
• Purgatory: Any condition or place of temporary punishment, suffering, expiation or the like; serving to clean, purify, or expiate 
• At first, the reader is suspended in a sort of of purgatory of literary expectation. (Joe Fessler)
• I spend over a year in purgatory before eventually being welcomed back into the field. (Dorie Clark: The Long Game)
• Crescendo: A steady increase in force or intensity 
• Ackerley had been building to a crescendo without me even noticing it. (Joe Fessler)
• Operatic: Of relating to opera; exaggerated or melodramatic behavior, often thought to be characteristic of operatic acting. 
• But look how quickly he turns from the matter-of-fact to the operatic, as he shows us how much he worries for her.(Joe Fessler)
• Ominous: Portending evil or harm; foreboding; threatening; inauspicious
• Every word is ominous.(Joe Fessler)
• Rectitude:Rightness of principle or conduct; moral virtue
• This is the question whether our state has a moral rectitude, or realizing what a state has to do, and how to do. (Dawn)