As one who has been reading constantly for most of my life, I don’t often encounter new words anymore. Except, that is, when I read something by Cormac McCarthy.
I decided I should start keeping track of my favorites when I, today, encountered two new beauties in the same sentence.
Here they are:
- Coomb (also spelled combe, or comb) – a narrow valley or deep hollow, especially one enclosed on all but one side.
- Threnody – a poem or song of mourning or lamentation.
And here is the sentence, from The Orchard Keeper:
“The coombs of the mountain fluted with hound voices, a threnody on the cooling air.”
Jonas David 