There are two almost polar opposite memes that I would like to explore on Wednesdays.

One is called Wordless Wednesdays and is a day for posting a picture as the day’s blog entry. There are book bloggers who participate in Wordless Wednesdays (see for example today’s “Ready for Spring” on Capricious Reader and “Winter Weeds” on Beth Fish Reads), but it is a much bigger meme than book blogs — today there are over 300 participants!

The other Wednesday meme is called Wondrous Words Wednesday and is hosted by Bermudaonion’s Weblog. Bermudaonion says: “Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading.”

Both of these memes are particularly challenging for me. I don’t pick up my camera as often as I mean to and I don’t stop my reading to look up words as often as I should. So, it will improve my life to do one or the other each Wednesday and it doesn’t matter much which one I choose any particular Wednesday. This week, it will be new words.

This is from The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting describing when the doctor and his animals were lost in the jungle.

They stumbled into wet, boggy places; they got all tangled up in thick convolvulus runners; they scratched themselves on thorns; and twice they nearly lost the medicine bag in the underbrush.

From Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
Convovulus. Any of a genus of erect, trailing, or twining herbs and shrubs of the morning-glory family. 

I spend a lot of time during my volunteer job using the Tropicos database of plants and here is the genus entry for Convolvulus.

The other two words are from Love in the Time of Cholesterol by Cecily Ross.

And yet, perhaps to compensate for his lack of emotional carapace, he is an extremely private person, slow to trust, and reluctant to draw attention to himself.

From The New Oxford American Dictionary on my iPad via Kindle:
Carapace The hard upper shell of a turtle or crustacean.

Actually, I did know that word and used it when I gave nature programs on turtles as a volunteer for the Missouri Conservation Department.  I didn’t recognize it when used metaphorically, but I like how it works.

Even with his prematurely gray hair, it was a young face, a face that hid nothing – anger, joy embarrassment, fear; no matter what he was feeling, the emotion lit up his features like surtitles at the opera.

I went to the library’s website to look up “surtitle” in the Oxford English Dictionary Online, since the two other dictionaries I consulted didn’t have the word. It meant what I thought it did, evolving from “subtitle,” according to the etymology.
Surtitle. A caption projected on to a screen above the stage during the performance of an opera, esp. to translate the libretto or explain the action. Freq. in pl.

The OED says it’s a proprietary term in Canada. The first use of the word is from 1983 when the New York Times reported a Canadian production that presented Richard Strauss’s ‘Elektra’ in German with English ‘surtitles’.