Vocabulary: Love in the Time of Cholera

In my triumphant return to the land of pleasure reading, I've picked up a couple books about some serious disease: the first on the plague and the other about cholera. Why? I generally read books in a topical matter...Indians, hippies, sports and lately it's been disease. I won't review either book just yet, but I did want to look at a number of words from the book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez entitled, Love in the Time of Cholera. So far, the book is great and a wonderful love story. It is, however, a bit of a higher brand of fiction and comes with some words that I either haven't seen before or couldn't accurately define them. Here goes:

• insipid - lacking flavor or zest; not tasty
• belied - to picture falsely; misrepresent
• camphor - an extract from the camphor laurel tree. Used in households to deter moths in cupboards
• crepe - a type of very thin cooked pancake usually made from wheat flour. The word, like the pancake itself, is of French origin, deriving from the Latin crispa, meaning "curled
• portico - a porch or entrance to a building consisting of a covered and often columned area
• lugubrious - exaggeratedly or affectedly mournful
• cisterns - an artificial reservoir (as an underground tank) for storing liquids and especially water (as rainwater)
• ossuary - a depository for the bones of the dead
• pastille - a small mass of aromatic paste for fumigating or scenting the air of a room
• perfidious - of, or relating to the quality or state of being faithless or disloyal
• landau - a four-wheel carriage with a top divided into two sections that can be let down, thrown back, or removed and with a raised seat outside for the driver
• libertine - usually disparaging : a freethinker especially in religious matters
• novenas - a Roman Catholic period of prayer lasting nine consecutive days
• curlew - any of various largely brownish chiefly migratory birds (especially genus Numenius) having long legs and a long slender down-curved bill and related to the sandpipers and snipes

For most of these definitions I used Merriam-Webster Online, which was a very cool, clean and easy-to-use resource