Caesar’s English
Lesson 12
Word
vulgar
traverse
undulate
vivid
pallor
Definition
common
to cross
to wave
bright
paleness
Vulgar - common
• Our adjective vulgar is what survives
of the ancient Latin word vulgus,
mob.
• When we say something is vulgar,
we are saying it is common, lacking
in good taste or refinement.
• In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in
the Willows there are vulgar songs.
• In Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer
someone “called Tom a bad, vicious,
vulgar child.”
Traverse – to cross
• The English verb traverse comes from the
Latin transversus, meaning to turn across.
• Sylvia Plath wrote a beautiful, haunting
sentence about how “Every so often a
beam of light appeared out of thin air,
traversed the wall like a ghostly,
exploratory finger, and slid off into nothing
again.”
• Sir Walter Scott used traverse in Ivanhoe
to describe a vivid sound: “The heavy yet
hasty step of the men-at-arms traversed
the battlements.”
Undulate – to wave
• To the Romans, an undula was a
small wave. Two thousand years
later, we still say that something
that waves undulates.
• Undulate (verb) and its noun form,
undulation, can describe anything
that moves in a wave-form, but it can
also describe something that
intensifies and that abates
Vivid- bright
• Our adjective vivid is a distant echo of the
Latin vivere, to live.
• Something that is vivid is bright, colorful,
lifelike. Vivid things make strong
impressions on us.
• In H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds,
about a Martian invasion of the Earth,
there is “a vivid red glare.” Wells used the
word repeatedly, describing a “vivid sense
of danger,” “puffs of vivid green vapor.” “a
vivid account of the Heat-Ray,” and “a vivid
blood-red tint.”
Pallor- paleness
• The English noun pallor comes from
the Latin pallere, to be pale. Pallor
is a noun; its adjective form is pallid.
• The most frequent use of pallor is to
describe the gray face of someone
who is sick, weak, or afraid.
• Joseph Conrad wrote of “the even
olive pallor of her complexion.”
• In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte wrote
the “Mr Rochester’s extreme pallor
had disappeared.”