Today's Drabble

[dawn_felagund]

Once again, it's just too easy, really....


afflatus \uh-FLAY-tuhs\, noun:
A divine imparting of knowledge; inspiration.

Examples
"Whatever happened to passion and vision and the divine afflatus in poetry?"
-Clive Hicks, "From 'Green Man' (Ronsdale)," Toronto Star, November 21, 1999

"Aristophanes must have eclipsed them...by the exhibition of some diviner faculty, some higher spiritual afflatus."
-John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets

"The miraculous spring that nourished Homer's afflatus seems out of reach of today's writers, whose desperate yearning for inspiration only indicates the coming of an age of 'exhaustion.'"
-Benzi Zhang, "Paradox of origin(ality)," Studies in Short Fiction, March 22, 1995

Etymology
Afflatus is from Latin afflatus, past participle of afflare, "to blow at or breathe on," from ad-, "at" + flare, "to puff, to blow." Other words with the same root include deflate (de-, "out of" + flare); inflate (in-, "into" + flare); soufflé, the "puffed up" dish (from French souffler, "to puff," from Latin sufflare, "to blow from below," hence "to blow up, to puff up," from sub-, "below" + flare); and flatulent.


And now for the (too easy) drabble, that somehow manages to incorporate nothing but two prepositions in the title. I shame myself, sometimes.


From Within
His peers credited the Valar for their inspiration, and they often asked him, “What of you?” for if any wonder was inspired by Varda’s stars or the gems of Manwë, it must be the Lamps of Fëanaro.

He laughed and named many things—but never the Valar: the love of his wife, the light in the eyes of his newborn sons, the undying loyalty of his father. For, then, even Fëanaro knew the danger that was unrestrained pride.

But the truth of his afflatus, he knew, in the same secret place where he kindled his genius:

It came from within.

Comments

[dawn_felagund]

Hee! I had never known "refulgent" before. No, it certainly does not sound like it is "shining radiantly; resplendent" (which is how dictionary.com has it defined).

"Pulchritudinous" works similarly for me. It sounds really icky, like "a pile of pulchritudinous vomit." Not a pretty word.

And "nonplussed," to me, seems like it would refer to someone calm and in control and not confused, not the other way around.

"Skulduggery" sounds like something Morgoth might have done to make orcs, certainly not a little innocent trickery.

I think the best thing about taking the GREs was learning all these crazy (sometimes archaic) words. I used to love when I'd encounter a word in my GRE book, look it up, and it was so archaic that it was no longer in the dictionary. Gotta love the priorities of standardized tests!

[frenchpony.livejournal.com]

I learned "refulgent" while shape-note singing; it appears in the tune The Last Words Of Copernicus. I used it as an Insult Apparent to a fencing coach I had a few years ago. Coach Phil was a terrible coach, and he was also fairly vain, but with a weird sense of style. He'd shave his head, let the stubble grow back to being just barely there, and then dye it blond. So, whenever he stood in front of a window, his head-fuzz would glow. I walked into the salle one day and chirped, "why, Phil, you look positively refulgent today!" And Coach Phil fumed and fumed because he didn't know what "refulgent" meant and was too proud to ask.

(Coach Mike is so infinitely better than Coach Phil that it almost doesn't deserve mention here. But Coach Mike is way cool.)

Another good word is sublunary, meaning "of the earth," derived from "below the moon," which is one way to look at the earth.