Lugubrious

lugubrious:(adjective) exaggeratedly or affectedly mournful; dismal

                Traversing Nevada’s lugubrious landscape tends to lull me to sleep.

                As a senior at Mascoutah Community High School I took five semesters of English: AP Literature (2 semesters), Advanced Communications, Creative Writing, and Detective Fiction. When I registered for school that summer, the counselor had wanted to place me in honors physics and calculus (based on my past course work), but my math ACT score guaranteed that I didn’t need any more arithmetic training, and science and I didn’t get along very well, so I told her where to put those classes since I already knew what I wanted to do with my life. Granted, she wasn’t very helpful with finding scholarships after that.

                Needless to say, that year I read multifarious literature, and a disproportionate amount was dark and brooding—some by choice, others (like Ethan Frome) not. The first mystery we read in Detective Fiction was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)” by Edgar Allan Poe, considered by some to be the first true detective story. I’m not sure if it was in that story, or one of the other stories involving brilliant investigators and their involvement in the lugubrious details of the dregs of criminality, but I came across the word lugubrious in context and instantly became enamored. It triggered something deep down in my writing self and began a lugubrious period of my writing. Heart of Darkness—now that’s lugubrious! I worked the new word into a several poems (that I no longer have) and into conversations until my communications teacher told me I was overusing it. She didn’t like me anyway. (I have witnesses to back me up.)

from http://imgkid.com/flying-raven-drawing.shtml

Yeah, I was kind of experimenting with writing darker, deadlier drama, when, introspectively, my life was neither difficult nor dreary. Ms. Wessel, the creative writing teacher said I started to sound like Joseph Conrad in my descriptions.

                And that isn’t cool enough, in Disney’s Hercules, the henchmen Pain and Panic refer to their lord Hades as “Your Most Lugubriousness.” Who wouldn't want a title like that? Don’t all raise your hands at once. And don’t worry; I’m not as lugubriously-minded as I thought I was as a senior.