The Silk Roads; learning words and expressions

Finishing up the Peter Frankopan epic, The Silk Roads. Especially distressing is the 21st century coverage of the Levant and surrounding neighborhood. The lessons of history are that no one except scholars and autodidacts studies history. You get the occasional Churchill, but for the most part leaders are muddlers who play checkers on a chessboard.

I'm adding "the Levant" to the list of words and expressions that I have had to make an extra effort to learn and glue to the old hippocampus. Other words that I have made an effort to learn over the course of life include palimpsest, quotidian, phlegmatic, mote. I also had had a hard time defining "irony" until I heard a character in a movie define it. "Laconic" was hard until I read it as applied to Coolidge. Sanguine: I can remember the second definition about bloodiness, but I often have to relearn the first definition. Reading William F. Buckley's newspaper column and Gore Vidal's novels and essays improved my sesquipedalian ambitions.