A peripatetic list of words I've looked up #2.

caravansary — an inn in some eastern countries with a large courtyard that provides accomodation for caravans

Almost certainly from The English Patient, though also possibly from Lolita, a book I didn’t like nearly as well as I was supposed to. It was a rough period in my life, and I can remember lying on the couch reading these books with my mind tumbling over and over a woman who I desperately loved who wouldn’t have me. I also read Portnoy’s Complaint in this state of mind, and thought it was awful.

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crapulous / crapulent — suffering from excessive eating or drinking; given to gross intemperance in eating or drinking

I wish I could tell you where I heard this one, but it’s lovely, isn’t it? The way it seems almost an onomatopoeia for the state it describes? The way crap is hidden in there, not so subtly, like a little gift from the winds of etymological history? I love it. Etymonline shows that crapulous is attested from 1530, crapulent from a few decades later; meanwhile, crap doesn’t turn up for another three centuries, meaning that, on some level, that little dirty pun was secreted into crapulous long before anybody could possibly have known.

Sadly, this bit of research has put the lie to one of my favorite little jokes in one of my favorite books: in The System of the World, our gnomic hero, Dr Daniel Waterhouse, spends a good hundred pages or so sifting through the back closets and crawl spaces of post-Glorious-Revolution-era London, in search of what he terms “Science Crapp”, viz., stuff that had once belonged to the latelamented Robert Hooke, to wit: “Daniel was lurking like a bat in an attic, supervising Henry Arlanc, who was packing Science Crapp into crates and casks.” Crap, in the sense of agglomeration of meaningless stuff, doesn’t seem to have come into common usage for another 150 years after the book takes place. Then again, science wasn’t really attested in the sense that it is there meant for another decade or two, so who knows, maybe that’s the whole joke and I just missed it the first four times I read the book.