Bookish Thursday - Imagining Word Meanings

I was reading Scavenging Beauty by Angelica Glass last week. It is a memoir of her seven years of walking all the roads and streets in her county in California. For her it was a form of not only exercise, but therapy. 

Right off I came across the word 'quaquaversal'. 

Normally, if I find a word I am not familiar with in something I am reading, I can gather enough from the context of the sentence or paragraph to get the meaning of the word. But this word, for some reason stopped me. 

I hopped out of bed (I was reading before going to sleep) and grabbed a notebook and pencil and wrote it down.

Quaquaversal - Sloping or spreading out in all directions of the compass. 

So it is like a domed mountain or a city center where it spreads out in all directions. It can also be used to talk about someone running madly around in all directions, like a chicken with their head cut off. 

Needless to say, it is not a word which will pop up in conversation with me.

Another word I came across was formosity. Formosity is beauty or a beautiful thing. She was describing the nature she saw on her walks. 

But the one which really had me picturing the meaning in my mind was griffonage.

Griffonage - careless handwriting; crude or illegible scrawl.

This word is definitely going into my 'words to use' in the future!

But the fun part was imagining it in my mind. And thanks to Canva AI, this is how I picture it...

What would a griffon be writing? Would it be a message to another griffon to be delivered by 'Air Griffon'? The history of griffons? Spells and griffon rituals and rites of passage? 

Griffonage is definitely something which will have to find its way into a story in the future. After all, with talons clutching a pen, how else would a griffon write?