antepenultimate \an-tee-pi-NUHL-tuh-mit\, adjective: 1. Third from the end. 2. Of or pertaining to an antepenult. noun: 1. An antepenult. I was my parent's antepenultimate child. -- dls, the blog of dlsesh1
The vengeful eagles of the open sequence [and] the birds of augury watched outside the library and the emblematic kinsmen who shake 'the wings of their exultant and terrible youth' in the antepenultimate entry in Stephen's diary. -- James Joyce, introduction by Hugh Kenner, Ulysses But all day that is how it is, from the first tick to the last tack, or rather from the third to the antepenultimate, allowing for the time it needs, the tamtam within, to drum you back into the dream and drum you back out again. -- Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier
Waiting on the Corners by Donald Hall Glass, air, ice, light, and winter cold. They stand on all the corners, waiting alone, or in groups that talk like the air moving branches. It is Christmas, and a red dummy laughs in the window of a store. Although the trolleys come, no one boards them, but everyone moves up and down, stamping his feet, so unemployed. They are talking, each of them, but it is sticks and stones that hear them, their plans, exultations, and memories of the old time. The words fly out, over the roads and onto the big, idle farms, on the hills, forests, and rivers of America, to mix into silence of glass, air, ice, light, and winter cold.
Even as it envelops me it is not mine, this autumn: that wind blowing through the pines, I regret how it makes them fall -- the leaves, the scarlet leaves of ivy.
Autumn Ivy Ogata kenzan, japanese, 1663-1743 Hanging scroll, ink color, and gold on paper 8 1/4 x 10 7/8 in., after 1732 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
douce \doos\, adjective: Sedate; modest; quiet. “So should I have been, in my interview with Sir Thomas— how shall I put it— more douce?” -- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall Port Glasgow is to the east of Greenock, Gourock to the west. The latter town combines a douce middle-class residential area and a Ken MacLeod. -- Edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection Douce comes from the French word of the same spelling meaning "sweet." It became widely used in English after it was used in the Chanson of Roland, a epic poem written about Charlemagne.
