Jane Eyre Vocab & Quotes: Installment Four

This is the fourth installment of my longstanding series Jane Eyre Vocabulary & Quotes. So without further ado, let us begin!

lugubrious: Full of sadness or sorrow, especially in an exaggerated or insincere way.

Mr. Underwood lugubriously recounted the passing of his pet Guinea Pig, Fluffums.

etiolate: To bleach and alter the natural development of (a green plant) by excluding sunlight. To make pale.

She stood motionless, like a marble statue, her etiolated limbs drained of blood despite the furious pumping of her heart, as the Tarantula inched its way across her foot.

habergeon: A medieval jacket of mail shorter than a hauberk.

Todd donned the Habergeon of Virginal Perpetuity before embarking upon his quest to claim the Throne of Nerdia.

subjoin: Annex or append.

Subjoining caramel frosting to the chocolate cakes was the confectioner’s secret.

welkin: The vault of the sky (firmament). The celestial abode of God or the gods.

Herman walked alone and desolated under the city’s foreboding welkin of clouded chrome.

Well, that’s all for now. Feel free to comment on this post with your own sentences from the words above. I’ll leave you with a quote from Jane Eyre:

Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances’ secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations.

Me: This passage reminds me very much of the beginning of The Great Gatsby when Fitzgerald made Nick ruminate thusly: “…I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”

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