"This Degenerate Little Noun" (Quintessentially Ligottiesque Words)

[Nicole Cushing]

I hope y'all will pardon the pun in the title to this new thread...I could not resist.

I'm just curious what your favorite "quintessentially Ligottiesque" words might be.

So far, I've been able to think of...

1. Blackness

2. Decay

3. Effluvia (I think I first read this word in Grimscribe -- in "The Night School", to be exact...and I think it may well be my favorite word of all time now)

4. Swine

So...what say you? What are some of your fave words (either prosaic or obscure) that you find appearing over and over again in Ligotti works. "Puppet" and "mannequin" and "clown" are others...but I don't dig them quite as much as the ones I've listed. Now that I think about it, this thread might work best if we focused on the really obscure words. Tom has been known to sprinkle a few here and there throughout the stories and poems.

And, for the sake of generating a large deal of discussion, let's expand the scope beyond nouns. Adjectives, verbs, etc. are all welcome.

[sundog]

Nonsense

Especially Outrageous Nonsense.

[Joel]

Ruins.

[Piranesi]

Delirium, delirious ...

[Piranesi]

Some obscure and scrumptious words from The Conspiracy: braggadocio, pontificate, vituperation, deracinate, and occlusion.

[Michael]

The first time I read Ligotti (The Nightmare Factory) I underlined words that stood out to me that I had never seen any other writer use. These are a few that I underlined: tatterdemalion, lucubration, carnefax, emulous, eidola, revenant, "prestidigitorial regalia", claustral, epicene, "obiter dicta", novitiate, grimoire, nomen, thaumaturgic, mucilage, and foreordained. There are others but those were a few that stood out to my 17 year old mind. Still do. Rarely (can count on one hand) does a writer have such intoxicating mastery of language as Ligotti.

[Nicole Cushing]

Quote Originally Posted by Michael

The first time I read Ligotti (The Nightmare Factory) I underlined words that stood out to me that I had never seen any other writer use. These are a few that I underlined: tatterdemalion, lucubration, carnefax, emulous, eidola, revenant, "prestidigitorial regalia", claustral, epicene, "obiter dicta", novitiate, grimoire, nomen, thaumaturgic, mucilage, and foreordained. There are others but those were a few that stood out to my 17 year old mind. Still do. Rarely (can count on one hand) does a writer have such intoxicating mastery of language as Ligotti.

Part of me wonders if Tom's background editing relatively obscure academic journals led him to have such a rich vocabulary (I'm sure he ran into words, in that line of work, that the rest of us just never come across). The stories have sometimes sent me to my dictionary, and if I recall correctly some of the strange words I ran into came from obscure corners of science.

(Some of the words also seem to come from religious or occult traditions, too).

[DoktorH]

Diseased, degenerate, nobody, finally, special, sideshow, work, nothing, nowhere, no one, nonsense.

[Justin Isis]

Quote Originally Posted by DoktorH

Diseased, degenerate, nobody, finally, special, sideshow, work, nothing, nowhere, no one, nonsense.

If you rearranged these words into a sentence and added punctuation, you could have a Ligotti description of human life, or the shortest Ligotti story ever. Something like:

Sideshow work — degenerate, diseased, finally nothing, nobody special: nonsense, no one, no where.

Okay, so there's no verb, but the sentence is too slumbrous, enervated, postlapsarian and deracinated to need one.

[DoktorH]

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

If you rearranged these words into a sentence and added punctuation, you could have a Ligotti description of human life, or the shortest Ligotti story ever. Something like: Sideshow work — degenerate, diseased, finally nothing, nobody special: nonsense, no one, no where. Okay, so there's no verb, but the sentence is too slumbrous, enervated, postlapsarian and deracinated to need one.

There's probably several good sentences in there. This thread could result in a LIgottian Magnetic Poetry Kit.

I think I can make work a verb: "Degenerate nobodies finally work sideshows nowhere - nothing special, no one diseased." It is the most ligottian of sideshows, devoid of any of the commonplace mutants and monstrosities to which sideshow-goers have become accustomed. Just nobodies, no one special, unmemorable people no more degenerate or diseased than any other person you'd see walking down some less than straight street in the shade of some veering towards the tilt building, working at tasks of insurmountable vagueness and joylessness in cubicles of nondescript design and dimension.

Such a sideshow does not disgust with twisted flesh, but the few people who attend, always for for free, always at night, always in some forgotten part of town where the signs are faded to foreboding palimpsests and the businesses never seem to be open and never display just what kind of business they transact, find themselves forever burdened by the experience: first with a sense that it was they who were on display, then later with a slow accumulation of dull, dingy coins of indeterminable value and origin.

Vagueness, nondescript, and Joylessness are good Ligottian words too.