Back in March we announced the WNBA-NYC Forgotten Words Contest. We gave you the following group of forgotten words and asked you to use them in one sentence:
pollard, rimy, contumacious, gormandize, caparison
The results are now in, and congratulations go to Elaine Whitehouse for submitting the winning entry! As a prize, she will receive a $20.00 gift certificate for Amazon.com.
And here it is, Elaine’s winning entry:
Upon the cold and rimy land stood a thin, bare pollard whose lack of branches made me wonder if someone or something contumacious had gormandized its leaves and branches, and I wanted to gently place my horse’s caparison over it for protection, but, alas, I could not.”
Congratulations also to Rachel Slaiman, the only member to correctly identify Great Expectations by Charles Dickens as the classic novel in which all five forgotten words appear.
This sounds like the first line in a dystopian-y, post-apocalyptic-y, story. Elaine, why couldn’t s/he put the caparison over the tree for protection? Where was s/he going? I’m not kidding about the story – I think you should work on this. It could even work as happening during The Little Ice Age.
If you changed a couple of the forgotten words for something less obscure — although I love this sentence because it’s so lyrical — and it would be more accessible.