Dolor Rosa

There’s no way the word morose connotes or denotes “ill-tempered”.

I wanted to be clear about the distinctions between morose, and sad, so I googled morose. Full disclosure: I may have used yahoo– I may have yahooed morose. Yahoo! has quite a long time ago usurped Google as my “home page”, despite the fact I tell cloud or something or other I prefer Google. I go to Yahoo. Yet that little house-like icon which reminds me so much of those red Monopoly houses, is still there on my dashboard, or whatever it is, so I can, most of the time, go to Google, to google.

I have managed, in the meantime, to bestir myself, to get up, and grab my Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. The one with “Almost 160,000 entries and 200,000 definitions”.

Morose:

“\m ə’ros, mo-\adj [L morosus, lit. capricious,fr. mor-,mos will — more at MOOD] (1565) 1 : having a sullen and gloomy disposition 2 :marked by or expressive of gloom syn see SULLEN — morosely adv moroseness n–morosity\”

No explicit mention of “ill-tempered”.

I’m going back now, to Adair, in Nebraska, on the morning she is to leave for NYC. There is the smell of cinnamon, yeast, coffee, and walnuts, and raisins, in the air. Yet, what about the air?

The air in the kitchen is morose.

Adair can’t look at her father or mother. Why the heck is this? She can’t leave Nebraska on their “half-blessing” or “half-grace”, though asking for a simple majority also won’t fit the bill. She’s going to NYC, but what if she was being sent to Washington, D.C. — as an intern? Adair has finished high school, not entered college, nor felt she was properly prepared, for college, or Med, or Law school.

” ‘Dolorosa’ means sorrowful or painful,in Spanish and Latin, derived from the Latin word for pain or grief. It is most famously used in the term Via Dolorosa (“Sorrowful Way”), referring to the path Jesus is said to have taken to his crucifixion in Jerusalem. It also appears in Mater Dolorosa (“Sorrowful Mother”), a title for the Virgin Mary grieving over her dead son. ”