I was pleasantly reading along in my most recent book, Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy when BOOM! out of nowhere came this word.
It would have been fairly easy except for their heavy packs. Each man carried a fifty-pound load. The added weight and their fatigue affected their balance, with the result that someone watching from a distance might have taken the Marines for old women crossing an icy street. It was a fifty-degree slope down, in some places almost vertical, with some paths worn into the slopes, perhaps by the wild deer that throve here. For the first time fatigue worked in their favor. Fresher, they might have tried to move more quickly; as it was, each man was near the end of his string, and feared his own weakness more than the rocks. It took over an hour, but they made it down with nothing worse than cuts on their hands and bruises somewhere else.
Clancy, Tom - Red Storm Rising
Did you see it? Throve. Seriously? I felt sure it was a type. I actually took a second to look it up, and "Yep" there is it. Who knew that was the past of thrive (here). I bet if I polled a hundred people no one would know that.
3 comments:
Awwww Dick, you should have kept it as a guessing game. Yes, I saw it as soon as I read it and thought 'that's it'. So one thrives when they are well nourished and throve is when they used to feed there.
Next time I need a passage with a less obvious word for the search. It stopped me cold when I read it. Thanks for the comments!
I came across a wonderfully pretentious word in a novel yesterday: contumacious.
I had to look it up and now I love it so much that I'm quite prepared to write an entire novel just for the chance to slip it in.
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