Who's the good looking guy

Reader's　Digest 5月・６月合併号の記事 "Parenting Is a Joke!" からの引用です。
Honesty is great except when you're on the receiving end. One thing that takes some getting used to is just how uncensored young children are.
A little grl is rifling through the family photo album. She stops turning pages and asks her mother, "Who's the good looking guy on the beach standing with you with all the muscles and the curly hair?"
"That's your father," the mother says.
"Really?" asks the girl. "Then who's the old, fat, bald man who lives with us now?"

persnickety

Reader's　Digest 5月・６月合併号の記事 "Serving Some Tennis Facts" からの引用です。

Wimbledon is the oldest ongoing tournament, and it's loaded with unique traditions. Players must wear "suitable attire" that is "almost entirely white." The rules also include this persnickety note: "White does not include cream." But strawberries and cream are highly encouraged: It's Wimbledon's signature dessert, with about 200,000 servings sold at the All England Club in a typical tournament.

つい最近今年のウィンブルドンの試合が終わったばかりですね。男子の決勝を見ましたが、両選手とも確かに白いウェアを着ていました。

"persnickety" を辞書で調べます。

・Collins Dictionary: If you describe someone as persnickety, you think that they pay too much attention to small, unimportant details.: He is a very rigorous man, very persnickety.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: giving too much attention to small details that are not important in a way that annoys other people: A hobby once dominated by persnickety elites was fully democratized.
・Vocabulary.com: Persnickety is a lively, fancy word for “fussy.” If you've sent your salad back to the kitchen three times, you might be a persnickety eater.
The adjective persnickety sounds prickly like a porcupine, and persnickety people can indeed be sharp and prickly when they don't get things precisely as they wish. If you're persnickety about your coffee, you'll probably want to put the cream and sugar in yourself.

lantana picture

Reader's Digest ５月・６月合併号を読んでいます。"World of Good Reaspms to Smile" の記事から引用します。

For those who aren't headed on a safari any time soon, an art exhibit called The Great Elephant Migration is heading across America. It'll pass through Wyoming in May and Montana in June. Each statue stands up to 11 feet tall and weighs as much as 750 pounds. They are made of lantana--a toxic weed that overtakes other vegetation that elephants eat--by Indigenous artisans in India's Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, for whom coexisting with elephants is second nature. "It gives people livelihood and clears lantana from the forest," co-founder Tarsh Thekaekara told CBS News. "So it's a win-win for both people and nature."

"lantana" は知っていましたが、英文で読むのは初めてでこのスペルは知りませんでした。小さな花が塊になって咲き、色も沢山あり、好きな花ですが、有毒なせいか最近は余り見かけなくなりました。

air-fryer

Reader's　Digest 5月・６月合併号の記事 "More to DIGEST" からの引用です。

Taste of Home's Vintage Recipes Made Easy is chock-ful of the choice recipes of yesteryear, simplified by the means of today. (You have access to eomething your mom didn't: an air-fryer.)

"air-fryer" は調理器の一種のようですが、聞いた事がありません。辞書を見ます。

・Merriam-Webster: an airtight, usually small electrical appliance for quick cooking of foods by means of convection currents circulated rapidly by a fan: Air fryers create a crispy coating on foods using minimal oil by way of convection.
・Wiktionary: A small countertop convection oven.: A genericized trademark of Airfryer, a brand name introduced by Philips in 2010.

日本では普及していないのでしょう。見たこともありません。

wet nurse

John Grishamの小説 "Camino Winds" を読み終えたので次の本を借りたいところですが、予約している雑誌のReader's Digestが数日後に借りられるはずなのでその間に簡単に読める本として、速読本の "Les Miserables" と "Madam Bovary" を借りました。1番レベルの高い速読本ですが速読本なので取り上げたい表現や単語は "Les Miserables" には全くありませんでしたが、"Madam Bovary" には三つの知らない単語が出てきました。

As the doctor felt that his wife was not strong enough to feed the baby herself, the little girl was sent to a wet nurse. With nothing else to do in the days after the birth, Emma tried to think of a name for her daughter. First she went through names with Italian endings like Clara Louisa, Amanda. She rather liked old names like Galsuinde, of Yseult of Leocadie. Charles wanted the child to be called after her mother. Emma said no.

"wet nurse" は文脈から乳母と推測できますが、辞書で確認します。

・Collins Dictionary: In former times, a wet nurse was a woman who was paid to breast-feed another woman's baby.: Experts say anyone acting as a wet nurse should be screened for illness beforehand.
・Merriam-Webster: a woman who cares for and breastfeeds children not her own: The story begins with Agnes, a woman hired as a wet nurse by a wealthy family after the death of her own son.

後の二つの単語は現在あるいは日本では全く使わない単語なのでブログには取り上げません。
"Les Miserables" と "Madam Bovary"　の両方共フランス人の作品なので人名が難しく、英語版でも読みにくかった。