Saturday, July 16, 2005

Grateful for Words

While reading www.nytimes.com 's review of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, I discover two words I don't know. Love it! Thank goodness for newspapers who don't dumb down to readers even though I'm one of the readers who rush to the dictionary often.

bildungsroman

tropes

4 comments:

Sue said...

ok, i found "tropes" but not "bildungsroman" -- any hints?

Kathryn said...

Isn't bildung a picture in German?
Baffled by the roman half, though...oh, no, I get it...not Romans as in Italy but as in romance...
The question is, what did they make of the book??

Unknown said...

Merriam-Webster says:
Etymology: German, from Bildung education + Roman novel
: a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character

I would have said it was a novel about the hero's journey, which is sort of the same thing.

Anonymous said...

Please capitalize German nouns: Bildungsroman.