Still learning new words

Grawlix for example

Tell me about it...

I learned 131 new ones just from reading Lolita

http://dynamo.dictionary.com/173835/list

I've got about another 500 written on scraps of paper lying about the house. Better do something about that one of these days.

Grawlix for example

Not finding this in a dictionary, I first wondered whether in fact this was perhaps not even English, eg, maybe the Polish word for gravlax.

But further research indicates that it is intended to be English, and is a made-up-word, made up by a writer (that I've never heard of before) about 30 years ago. It is one of a number of words he made up, none of which I have ever seen before to my recollection. Now made-up-words don't count, unless they get some currency. Clearly it doesn't have sufficient currency to get into mainstream dictionaries.

Maybe it gets some regular use some places, but evidently not places I go, so I don't think I will bother trying to remember it. Whether I succeed in forgetting it, I cannot say.

But further research indicates that it is intended to be English, and is a made-up-word, made up by a writer (that I've never heard of before) about 30 years ago.

I guess you have to be American to be familiar with Beetle Bailey comic strips. According ot Michael Quinon, Mort Walker "first used it in 1964 in an article he wrote for the National Cartoonists Society in the US."

I guess you have to be American...

I've been reading quite a few books by James Ellroy over the last couple of years. I find the vocabulary really quite hard work, even now I'm on my 7th. And few of the words that throw me are found in mainstream dictionaries. Sometimes the vocabulary is reasonably clear, but I still don't know what it means: there are cultural assumptions. I could do with detailed cultural footnotes like one gets in editions of 19th century novels. He uses quite a lot of historical facts and real people as a backdrop, and I've occasionally rediscovered that truth can be stranger than fiction.

I am not familiar with Elroy, but I just now read a few pages of one of his books on Google Books. I can see why his vocabulary would be tough for a non-American & even tougher for a non-native English speaker. He moves words around from noun to verb to adjective and back to noun. He uses a lot of slang, jargon & colloquialisms that I can get in context, but which are more likely to be familiar to a devotee of American tabloids.

A few years ago I started a James Ellroy book but quit after a few chapters. I don't remember his style or vocabulary as being particularly difficult, just that it was so gruesome -- all those horrible descriptions of mutilated bodies, etc.

Yes, the few pages I read included several point blank shootings, a poison gas attack, and the burning of a couple of bodies. Did not make me want to run out to the library and take out every one of his books.

which are more likely to be familiar to a devotee of American tabloids.

Indeed the first book of his I read is called American Tabloid.