Tom Rymour writes:

 

Dear All,

What about 'ensellure'? I forget if it was the small of Lolita's back, or  
Ada's. Not a prosaic Saxon word, but one of those enticing, euphonious,  
filthy, fancy, foreign, French mots justes which have been infiltrating  
our plain speech since 1066.

Hugs and kisses,

Tom (Rymour)

> Thanks, James. Nick Antosca¹s first quotation from Lolita includes that
> mood-killing technical word, NATES, which, unsurprisingly, 12-year-old  
> Nick
> has to look up. Alas, NATES still rhymes with GRATES in my affronted
> Anglophonic soul. Unless you pronounce NATES as \nartays\, the Latin  
> plural
> of NATIS, which is, presumably. just one singular, turn-the-other-cheek  
> bum.
>
> If the use of NATES is to suggest a surgical lexicon/mindset for Humbert,
> why does VN use the everyday English
> SHOULDER-BLADES in the same passage, rather than the matching  
> cold-medical
> OMOPLATES (found elsewhere. e.g., in The Original of Laura, about which
> Jansy and I have had several exchanges)?
>
> Nick and I, and most honest males, see Lolita with a sweet, young,
> out-of-bounds ass. Her nates belong with her glutæus maximus (suitably
> pluralized) on some Gray¹s (not Grey¹s) Anatomy Dissection Table.
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle.