{"id":1588,"date":"2021-10-28T20:04:09","date_gmt":"2021-10-29T00:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=1588"},"modified":"2021-10-29T11:03:40","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T15:03:40","slug":"words-of-the-week-halloween-adjectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2021\/10\/28\/words-of-the-week-halloween-adjectives\/","title":{"rendered":"Words of the Week! Halloween Adjectives!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mutant\"<\/a>Odd, isn’t it, how many words we associate with Halloween’s horror begin with the letter “g”?\u00a0 I covered “grotesque<\/a>” back in 2018. Let’s have a look at a few others that spring, like a zombie from its grave, to mind.<\/p>\n

Gruesome:<\/strong> We do not hear this one as much as our next word, though I associate gruesome things with gore. The OED<\/a> blames Sir Walter Scott for introducing our word to literature, in the sense of “Inspiring fear, awe, or horror; such as to cause one to shudder with fear; fearful, horrible; grisly.” Grisly: there’s another G word for Halloween. In any case, thank you, Sir Walter Scott; your giving us this word is nothing, compared to how Mark Twain blamed your books for the Civil War.<\/p>\n

Gory:<\/strong> Without getting visceral here, we know what this one entails (or entrails). Covered with blood! Yikes. Here’s The OED entry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ghastly:<\/strong> This word sounds almost prim, in comparison to the rest of our list. From Middle English, according to The OED<\/a>, this type of terror gets associated with…guess what? The sight of carnage or death! In its obsolete sense, it’s a Downton Abbey<\/em> word for something repellant, in the sense of “oh, Heavens! Her silver service looks ghastly!”<\/p>\n

Ghoulish:<\/strong> I think of a ghoul (thank you, H.P. Lovecraft) as a creature that eats dead bodies. Long before\u00a0Night of The Living Dead<\/em>, we had such fiends in speculative literature. So what does The OED<\/a> say? It notes that if you resemble a flesh-eater, or take an unnatural interest in these matters, you are ghoulish. Right now, that would include me. I like that we have, in part, an Arabic loan-word at play here, from a creature out of The Arabian Nights.<\/p>\n

Ghostly:<\/strong> Even if we have not seen a ghost, we know what the word implies: a disembodied soul wandering the earth. It is an old word, going back to Germanic origins. The adjective form has a history nearly as long, but in our sense of something eerie or unnatural, we only need to time-travel back to the 18th Century. It’s a fascinating word with many obsolete meanings, as a long OED entry<\/a> explains.<\/p>\n

Grim:<\/strong> Given his job, how could he be the “Happy Reaper”? As with “ghost” The OED notes<\/a> that the word came to the British Isles via the Grendel-haunted fens of Frisia and Germany, where the spelling was the same. Savage, cruel, fierce: all are wrapped up in this grim word.<\/p>\n

Happy Halloween! My movie pick for 2021? 1983’s The Hunger<\/em><\/a>! Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie are the most stylish vampires, ever.<\/p>\n

If you have a word or metaphor you enjoy, send them by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.<\/p>\n

See all of our Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

image from…never you mind. Keep your lights on.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Odd, isn’t it, how many words we associate with Halloween’s horror begin with the letter “g”?\u00a0 I covered “grotesque” back in 2018. Let’s have a look at a few others that spring, like a zombie from its grave, to mind. Gruesome: We do not hear this one as much as our next word, though I … Continue reading Words of the Week! Halloween Adjectives!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[87405,87406,40197],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-1588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology","category-loan-word","category-vocabulary","tag-word-of-the-week"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-pC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1588"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1593,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1588\/revisions\/1593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}