Another Sunday Goofy Word

Well, my in-laws have all left from the grand celebration surrounding my daughter's First Communion. There's a soft, sort of fragile quiet hanging over the house. It's blissful. You might think that, in this case, I'd opt for a word like "palliation" to highlight in this Sunday goofy word thing that I'm striving to work into my writing(s).

Instead, I'm picking a word that I meant to mention last week, but I spent most of the day Sunday laying on the couch, suffering through some malaise or another, which is a moderately poetic way of saying "I didn't feel like it."

Anyway, the word today showed up at Vic's joint, What Were You Thinking? The lovely Vic, in her bounteous and loving heart, adopted a word from SavetheWords.org. It was such a lovely word, I've decided I needed to use it a book somewhere.

Vicambulate: v. to walk about the streets

The word finds its roots in the Latin verb ambulare which means "to travel/to traverse" or "to walk". This root pops up lots of other places, like circumambulate which means "to walk around" or, one of my very favorite Cenozoic creatures, ambulocetus, which is an ancient whale ancestor and literally means "the walking whale". The vic part comes from the Latin vicus which means "a grouping of houses" or "village."
This one is easy. I already worked it in while I was doing a bit of rewriting/revision the other day. The scene here is that the main character, Nathaniel, is returning home after three years away at war. As he returns home, a storm breaks out over the city (oh, symbolism!).

"Nathaniel raced through the streets, despite the sheets of rain slicking the paving stones. Neither the city guards nor the commoners who could normally be seen vicambulating Rock Creek were to be found; even the cutpurses and beggars had sought shelter against the pounding rains of the storm. The only people who could be seen in the streets were Nathaniel and those knights who formed the honorary guard around him."

So, there we go. Three words thus far, and two of them have actually been worked into manuscript form. Working "ambulocetus" into a story may prove to be a touch more difficult.