plangent = having a loud reverberating sound

"Plangent" shows up at the end of Ngaio Marsh's mystery Killer Dolphin. (It's the first book featuring Peregrine Jay.) Anyway, one of the characters reports thinking of The Cherry Orchard at the time just before the murder. Later, it's revealed that a guitar string had been plucked -- and the Chekov play ends on a "single plangent note."

This is one of those words that I've read multiple times but never bothered to look up, because I could figure it out from context. But it's always good to know what words actually mean. :)

golliwog = a grotesque black doll; a person resembling a golliwog

Apparently, Bertha Upton (American writer) published a children's novel in the late nineteenth century that used the term.

Most recently, I came across "golliwog" in Julian May's Pliocene Exile series; May frequently uses the word to describe the trickster Aiken Drum.

Why doesn't Harry Potter see the thestrals pulling the school carriages at the end of Book 4?

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
-- Pablo Picasso