Words.

I hadn't noticed it before, but Cormac McCarthy has quite the knack for using extremely interesting words that are just perfect for what is being portrayed in the story. This reminds me of our writer's workshop today on being concise. In order to be concise, you need a huge vocabulary.
Below you will find some phrases I picked out because they contain words that are particularly interesting or beautiful, or both.

"He used gasoline in the lighter and it burned with a frail blue flame and he bent and set set tinder a light and watched the fire climb upward through the wicker of limbs" (72)
Frail means weak or insubstantial, and wicker in this case means a plait or weave. The imagery here caught my eye, and made me notice the descriptive vocabulary.

"He dried him with the blanket, kneeling there in the glow of the light with the shadow of the bridge's undersrtucture broken across the palisade of treetrunks beyond the creek." (74)
A palisade is a form of enclosure or defense, such as a fence. I had never heard this word before, I had no idea what it meant and was therefore intrigued by the phrase.

"The shapes of the small tree limbs burning incandescent orange in the coals." (74)
I chose this phrase because it is so beautiful to read. It just created this striking image in my mind the minute I read it, even when I wasn't too sure what incandescent meant. Now I know it means glowing or emitting light.

"They moved through the streets like sappers." (79)
A sapper is a military engineer in charge of detecting or disarming mines. Very appropriate (also unexpected) descriptions for the dangerous situation that the boy and the man are in.

"Faint plume of their breath." (80)

Plume means to spread out in the shape of a feather. Fantastic imagery.

"The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality." (89)
I love these random sentences that keep showing up with these unexpected words out of the usually monochromatic (literally...) story. An idiom is a group of words that mean something entirely different when together than when taken literally and individually, usually a form of expression natural to a language. Referents are objects of reference, the thing that something else would stand for or reference.

"The heads not truncheoned shapeless had been flayed of their skins and the raw skulls painted and signed across the forehead in a scrawl and one white bone skull had the plate sutures etched carefully in ink like a blueprint for an assembly." (90)

Part of the reason I chose this phrase was because its so descriptive and complex and eye-catching. Very similar, I imagine, to the scene which it describes. A truncheon is a baton, similar to a bludgeon, which could be a weapon or symbol of authority. I'm going to assume that here it is a weapon, and to be truncheoned is to be hit repeatedly with said weapon until extreme damage has occurred. To flay is to peel the skin off of. Lastly, sutures are just stitches to a wound.