Reading Dune (2 of 2): Vocabulary in the wild.

Back when I worked at the resthome, the one resident who's a retired school nurse used to pass along these fun "word of a day" print-outs that this one retired engineer used to print out from some email list that he's been a long-time paid subscriber to. And, unlike a lot of vocabulary builder or novelty vocabulary calendars or whatever, these words were actually super obscure and interesting, and you'd never heard of most of them, though that also made them hard to retain, where there would be a really good and interesting batch of words for the week, but then an hour after you'd finished reading them, not a single one would stick with you. But, when I was reading Dune, this one phrase popped out a number of times, "distaff side," to mean someone on the mother's side of the family, as opposed to "spear side" for the father's side. It was like, at last, a sighting of one of those vocabulary items in the wild!