Wondrous Words Wednesday 23/11/11

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a fabulous weekly meme hosted by Bermuda Onion, where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our weekly reading.  

Recently I read the rather fascinating The Pedant in the Kitchen. Julian Barnes always provides us with lots of new words, and this book was no exception. 

1. Matutinal. Adjective. 

But male culinary competence was clearly limited to such matutinal dabbling. 

Of, relating to, or occuring in the morning; early. 

Black swan and white geese enjoying a Tasmanian morning

2. Avuncular. Adjective.

I need an exact shopping list and an avuncular cookbook. 

i) Of or having to do with an uncle. 

ii) Regarded as a characteristic of an uncle, especially in benevolence or tolerance. 

3. Prelapsarian. Adjective.

It surprised him to discover that gardening, for all its air of prelapsarian serenity, is furiously competitive, frequently indulged in by the envious, the deceitful, the quietly criminal. 

Of or relating to the period before the fall of Adam and Eve. 

4. Midinette. Noun. 

And the more I browsed through the 300 recipes intended 'for the student, the midinette, for the clerk, for the artist, for lazy people, poets, men of action, dreamers and scientists', the more the book seemed an aromatic trifle very much of it's age. 

A Parisian seamstress or salesgirl in a clothes shop. 

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5. Umber. Adjective

After decades of cooking dauphinois potatoes the same way, I was instantly converted to his version; sloppier, creamier, the surface an eruption of umber bubbles, it took me back years and kilometres. 

i) Of or relating to umber. 

ii) Having a brownish colour. 

Also a noun. Any natural brown earth containing ferric oxides and manganese oxides, used as pigment.  All definitions from The Free Dictionary. 

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