Eleanor Catton was awarded the Man Booker Prize earlier this week for her novel The Luminaries, described by The New York Times as "an immersive tale set in 19th-century New Zealand that explores identity, greed and human frailty." Told in a voice reminiscent of its setting, the novel is a treasure trove for vocabularians, introducing words as rich and rare as spume, which Catton uses when she writes:
The strictness and uniformity with which the men ignored him might have aroused Mr. Moody's interest, had he been himself in body and temperament. As it was, he was queasy and disturbed. He had known the voyage to West Canterbury would be fatal at worst, an endless rolling trough of white water and spume that ended on the shattered graveyard of the Hokitika bar, but he had not been prepared for the particular horrors of the journey, of which he was still incapable of speaking, even to himself.
Catton uses spume in this passage in its noun form. It means the froth you find in seawater. As a verb, spume means to froth or make bubbly. It derives from the Latin spuma, which went on also to produce the word for the Italian molded ice cream dessert spumoni. But the Italian word you might want to remember is cappuccino, as the required foaming of milk might remind you of the foaming, or spuming, of the sea.
