Traduce

v. to lower or disgrace the reputation of; expose to shame or blame by utterance of falsehood or misrepresentation; to vilify; to slander.

While Russia was well, a foreignor could serve her and be a splendid minister; but so soon as she is in danger she needs one of her own kin. The sole result of traducing him as a traitor will be that later on, ashamed of their false accusations, they will suddenly turn him into a hero or a genius, which would be still more unfair to him. He's an honest and conscientious German....

--Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace

"Signor, said the squire, I have at length traduced my wife to consent that I shall attend your worship wheresoever you shall please to carry me." "Say reduced, and not traduced, Sancho," replied the knight.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

...an American individualist who refused to leave unexamined the orthodoxies of the customary and the established truth, an American individualist who did not always live in compliance with majority standards of decorum and taste, an American individualist par excellence was once again so savagely traduced by friends and neighbors that he lived estranged from them until his death, robbed of his moral authority by their moral stupidity.

Philip Roth, Human Stain

...verbs that hurt.

Sear

v. To char, scorch, or burn the surface of with or as if with a hot instrument.

There was also a smell: the same smell that would drift upriver, years later, to find me in my bed or in the field hockey goal. Like my own, similarly beaked nose at those times, my grandfather's nose went on alert. His nostrils flared. He inhaled. At first the smell was recognizable, part of the organic realm of bad eggs and manure. But after a few seconds the smell's chemical properties seared his nostrils, and he covered his nose with his handkerchief.

--Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

It was as though I rolled through a bed of hot coals. It seemed a whole century would pass before I would roll free, a century in which I was seared through the deepest levels of my body to the fearful breath within me and breath seared and heated to the point of explosion. It'll all be over in a flash.

--Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

....verbs that hurt.

Spurn

v. to reject with contempt; to scorn.

Malachy, at the far end of the bar, turned pale, gave the great breasted ones a sickly smile, offered them a drink. They resisted the smile and spurned the offer. Delia said, We don't know what class of a tribe you come from in the North of Ireland.

--Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes

Ted had already shown his workroom to his future models--Mrs. Mountsier and her daughter, Glorie. Effie had refused to leave the backseat of the car. Poor Effie was ahead of her time: She was a young woman of integrity and insight and intelligence, trapped in a body that most men either ignored or spurned; of the three women in the dark-green Saab on that Friday afternoon, Effie was the only one with the wisdom to see that Ted Cole was as deceitful as a damaged condom.

--John Irving, A Widow for a Year

Theme: verbs that hurt

Rube

n. (slang) - an unsophisticated country person; a yokel, a hick.

"We walked around with great big bread sticks sticking out of our pockets. They practically said, 'Hey, look at us, a couple of rubes from New Jersey.' We were probably just the kind of Americans they laugh at. But who cared? We walked around, nibbling at the tops of them, looking at everything, the Louvre, the garden of Tuileries--it was just wonderful...."

--Philip Roth, American Pastoral

The Whammer crowded the left side of the plate, gripping the heavy bat low on the neck, his hands jammed together and legs plunked evenly apart. He hadn't bothereed to take off his coat. His eye on Roy said it spied a left-handed monkey.

"Throw it, Rube, it won't get any lighter."

Though he stood about sixty feet away, he loomed up gigantic to Roy, with the wood held like a caveman's axe on his shoulder. His rocklike frame was motionless, his face impassive, unsmiling, dark.

--Bernard Malamud, The Natural

Piker

n. (slang) (1) a cautious gambler; (2) person who's regarded as petty or stingy (also Aussie-speak for someone who doesn't pull his own weight, or chickens out)

"Me/ two wives, that's my limit. I'm a piker next to my brother. His new one's in her thirties. Half his age. Jerry's the doctor who marries the nurse. All four, nurses. They revere the ground Dr. Levov walks on. Four wives, six kids. That drobe my dad a little nuts. But Jerry's a big guy, a gruff guy, the high-and-mighty prima donna surgeon--got a whole hospital by the short hairs--and, so, even my dad fell in line...."

--Philip Roth, American Pastoral

George contributed a few suggestions of his own during the discussions, touches here and there to move the operation into the realm of high-concept, so it wouldn't look like it was run by a bunch of pikers. "He wanted us to provide him with a nice yacht of his own for him to sail down to Columbia on from his escape, something about a hundred feet long. We'd give him all this money, and he'd have all these women on board, have access to an airplane when he'd got there , one he could call up when he wanted. He wanted to be set up like a millionaire...."

--Bruce Porter, Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Mil. with the Medellin Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All

*Continuing the theme of nouns that describe people.

Trollop

n. an idle, untidy woman; a slut; a whore.

The train hoots into the station and Gerry waves and points to Rose coming toward us from the far end of the train, Rose smiling away with her white teeth and lovely green dress. Gerry stops waving and mutters under his breath, Look at the walk on her, bitch hoor, streetwalker, flaghopper, trollop, and runs from the station.

--Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

"You must stop all of this," Ignatius shouted to Dorian, who was winking at the cowboy. "Aside from the fact that I am witnessing a most egregious offense against taste and decency, I am also beginning to smother from the stench of glandular emissions and colgne."

"Oh, don't be so drab. They're just having fun."

"I am very sorry," Ignatius said in a business-like tone. "I am here tonight on a mission of the utmost seriousness. There is a girl who must be attended to, a bold and forward minx of a trollop. Now turn off that offensive music and quiet these sodomites. We must get down to brass tacks."

--Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Sherpa

n. a skilled mountaineer from Nepal

The two kids piled out of the car, dragging their backpacks behind them. They both had backpacks that weighed about twenty pounds. I never got used to this. Kids didn't have huge backpacks when I was their age. We didn't have backpacks at all. Now it seemed all the kids had them. You saw little second-graders bent over like sherpas, dragging themselves through the school doors under the weight of their packs. Some of the kids had their packs on rollers, handling them like luggage at the airport. I didn't understand any of this. The world was becoming digital; everything was smaller and lighter. But kids at school lugged more weight than ever

.

--Prey by Michael Crichton

Sherpas remain an enigma to most foreigners, who tend to regard them through a romantic scrim. People unfamiliar with the demography of the Himalaya often assume that all Nepalese are Sherpas, when in fact there are no more than 20,000 Sherpas in all of Nepal, a nation the size of North Carolina that has some 20 million residents and more than fifty distinct ethnic groups. Sherpas are mountain people, devoutly Buddhist, whose forebears migrated south from Tibet four or five centuries ago. There are Sherpa villages scattered throughout the Himalaya of eastern Nepal, and sizable Sherpa communities can be found in Sikkim and Darjeeling, India, but the heart of Sherpa country is Khumbu, a handful of valleys draining the southern slopes of Mt. Everest--a small, astonishingly rugged region completely devoid of roads, cars, or wheeled vehicles of any kind.

--Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Soothsayer

n. a prophet, a prognasticator

[See Also: astrologer, astrologist, fortune teller, fortuneteller, illusionist, seer, visionary]

The loss of a life: unwelcome. Immoral? I don't know. Depends perhaps on where you are, and what sort of death. Hereabouts, where we sit among such piles of leftover protein we press into cakes for the pets, who usefully guard our empty chairs; here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight; then yes, for a child to die from hunger is immoral. But this is just one place. I'm afraid I have seen a world.

--The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver