You do know Michael Crummey, don’t you? I guess I don’t know him too well; I misspelled his name when I looked him up on Wikipedia so I could tell you his birth year (1965). I met him several years ago when I went on an Adventure Canada cruise: the circumnavigation of Newfoundland. I wanted to go to L’Anse aux Meadows, the restored site of the short-lived occupation of a remote northern part of Newfoundland by "Leif the Lucky”, the nickname given to the son of Eiric the Red. As you know, I have Icelandic forebears and I wanted to see where the Icelanders first came to North America, some 200 years before Christopher Columbus hit the West Indies. I t was a marvellous trip. I know I’ve written about it, probably in an early blog. Michael Crummey was a bonus.
He hired on as part of the care-crew: all we knew was that he could run a zodiac and take us into shore for our excursions. When we found out that he was a published, esteemed Atlantic Canada writer and poet with lots of awards and prizes, we begged him to join us in the ship's library and talk to us about his writing. I guess he was about 40 then. He looked 12, probably because someone cut his hair with a bowl. He is charming and sincere and humble and a very good writer. I bought a book later when there was a display and sale and got him to autograph it for me. (I’m a groupie.) I’ve bought and read more since, though not everything he’s written..
This is all by way of introduction to another collection of words I gathered in reading his work. He was born and bred in Newfoundland, although he did get his post-graduate degree from Queens University in Kingston. He went right back. I have the definitive Dictionary of Newfoundland English. edited by G.M. Story, W.J. Kerwin and J.D.A. Wiiddowson (University of Toronto Press, 1982). It’s a treasure, with roots and sources and early usage and quotations. I love words and I love dictionaries and I love this one. I’s fun to browse in but I first put it to use when I read Annie Proulx’s National Book Award-winning novel “The Shipping News”, set in Newfoundland. As I remember, she used knots at the beginning of each chapter, real fisherman’s/seaman’s knots, all very metaphorical. Bu I was more interested in her use of Newfoundland words and I looked them up in that dictionary. Some of them she adapted or changed the form to suit her needs, much as did Nabokov in his novel “Lolita. (I know because I made a list of them and looked them up in my OED.)
I have a children’s book, too, an alphabet book of Newfie words that I bought on that trip. I checked it out, too, and made a list which I recently discovered. Anyway, I found some simple, usable synonyms and that’s what I’ll pass on to you. My battery is at 4% now. Oh dear.

Like you, I have too many balls in the air, juggling and trying to keep up with them. So I decided to share one of them with you: words. I keep writing down words I come across in my reading. Some of them seem familiar but they are not yet part of my owned vocabulary, Perhaps you already know some of them. You can let me know if this is a waste of your time….

STOCHASTIC, adjective technical
having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.
ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Greek stokhastikos, from stokhazesthai ‘aim at, guess’, from stokhos ‘aim’. (I like the origin!)
HEURISTIC, adjective
enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves. a ‘hands-on’ or interactive heuristic approach to learning.
ORIGIN early 19th cent.: formed irregularly from Greek heuriskein ‘find’.
Here’s one I came across, definition and all:
ZARF (n.) The cardboard collar placed around a paper coffee cup to protect your hands from the heat. This item has usually been called a “cup sleeve” in modern times, but “zarf” is an old Arabic word, recently revived, for an ornamental holder for a coffee cup with no handle. Added to the American Heritage Dictionary in 2015. (It’s not in my computer dictionary.)
PERICOPE, noun
an extract from a text, especially a passage from the Bible. a book of pericopes.
ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: via late Latin from Greek perikopē ‘section’, from peri- ‘around’ + kopē ‘cutting’ (from koptein ‘to cut’). (Not what I expected at all.)
APOTROPAIC, adjective
supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck: apotropaic statues.
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Greek apotropaios ‘averting evil’, from apotrepein ‘turn away or from’ + -ic. (This should come in handy.)
ANFRACTUOSITY, noun
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from late Latin anfractuosus, from Latin anfractus ‘a bending’.
REREDOS, noun (pl.same) Christian Church
an ornamental screen covering the wall at the back of an altar.
ORIGIN late Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French, from Old French areredos, from arere ‘behind’ + dos ‘back’
I haven’t been able to find everything I wrote down, possibly because my writing is so bad I can’t read it, or else because the computer dictionary is more limited than the OED. No matter, there are lots more. In fact, I’ll save my next lot for tomorrow: eight words I found in Michel Crummey’s books. Newfoundland words, of course. I have a Newfoundland dictionary, so I was able to find them all.
Isn’t this fun?