plangent (PLAN-gent), adjective

1. of a loud and resonant sound; with a plaintive, mournful tone
2. (Webster’s 1913, Dict.) beating, dashing, as a wave

[from Latin plangere, to strike, lament]

plangency, noun
plangently, adverb
plangorous, adjective

“It seemed that I was standing in the outer reaches of beyond -- that Chernyshevsk was lost in it, hunkered down against plangent gales blowing from nowhere to nowhere.” -Jeffrey Tayler, The Atlantic Monthly, April 1997

“When Emily returns from the dead for one final look at her life, Ms. Miller omits the sobs suggested in the author's stage directions and in so doing provokes the audience to greater emotion. Her question to the Stage Manager, ''Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every every minute?'' resounds with plangency through the play.” -Mel Gussow, The New York Times, Dec. 11, 1988

''Paper Cities'' is a set of ingenious variations on the theme of how we compose ourselves, how we use art - to relieve our hurt and at the same time to feel it more keenly. Other poems take up this theme austerely or plangently. –J. D. McClatchy, The New York Times, May 26, 1985

“But the most fearful and tumultuous coil and stir, the terriblest and most boisterous garboil and hurry, the chiefest rustling black santus of all, and most principal hurly-burly springeth from the grievously plangorous howling and lowing of devils. . . . “ -François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

sus

1. a genus of the subfamily Suinae of the family Suidae which is the family of pigs, hogs and boars. (Now I know why my grandfather called his pigs with the holler: sooi, sooi, here sooi! And I thought farmers had no Latin!)

2. adj. short for ‘suspect’ or ‘suspicious.’ Hey man, I’m sus about that sus -Urban Dictionary.com

“From the petite pygmy hog Sus salvanius to the immense wild boar Sus scrofa, swine are fascinating animals.” -www.sandiegozoo.org

“Nevertheless the first published accounts of M were deeply self serving narratives, each cut and shaped to fit the author’s thesis. Each one’s version of M was wholly sus.” -Peter Robb, M, The Man Who Became Caravaggio, p. 2 (1998)

“Her quarry in these golden Mendocino hills was Sus scrofa, a squat, muscular wild boar with coarse dark hair, hairy ears, a thick armor-like hide and skewers for tusks, which is now overrunning the countryside to become the latest plague of California.” -Patricia Leigh Brown, The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2005

UNDER a 150-year-old British law, repealed in 1979, a suspect could be held in police custody for 24 hours without being formally charged with an offense. Barrie Keeffe's play ''Sus'' (for ''suspect''), which opened Sunday night at the Hudson Guild Theater, deals with one such victim of police harassment. –Mel Gussow, The New York Times, April 13, 1983

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Bornean_Bearded_Pig.jpg Sus barbatus

escapees, dAb, escapees. Into the corner and print it 100 times and no recess for you!

-dAb :)

Mimesis as camouflage.

mimesis (mi-MEE-sis ) noun

a. in art and literature, representation or imitation of human behavior, speech etc.
b. in biology, mimicry

From Greek mimesis, imitation < mimos imitator.

related words: mimetic, adj; mimetically, adverb; mimicry, noun

In the last song, ''Der Leiermann'' (''The Organ-Grinder''), there were hints of mimesis; the two looked hunched with age, twisted with mortality. But mostly the dancing floated free of the texts' imagery. –John Rockwell, The New York Times, July 14, 2006

Sissel Tolaas, an odor artist and perhaps the fragrance industry’s most controversial figure, pushes across her desk a small glass bottle containing pale liquid. I inhale, and then, phew! If my nose is to be trusted, a male armpit has unfurled, only inches away. And it’s perspiring heavily. She will be exhibiting nine of her sweat smells this fall.
This isn’t real sweat, but a sophisticated mimesis. It was designed at the research laboratory that Tolaas leads in Berlin, an outpost of International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. –Susie Rushton, The New York Times, August 27, 2006

One is mimesis, and few artists mimic reality to more riveting effect than Ron Mueck, the British sculptor whose ''Dead Dad'' was one of the hits of last year's ''Sensation'' exhibition. . . . . Other marvels of mimesis include an actual-size ladybug by Tom Friedman, a field of delicate red mushrooms by Roxy Pain and a lovingly carved and painted dead duck by Michael Combs. –Ken Johnson, The New York Times, June 9, 2000

“Mimesis has generally been discussed as thought it were a characteristic inhering in the image: that is, as the copy’s likeness to its archetype. This assumption comes naturally, if one assumes that the archetype and image are quite distinct. However, the distinction is by no means clear if one assumes, as Augustine himself did, that the image “participates” in the archetype.” -Karl F. Morrison, “From Form into Form”; “Mimesis and Personality in Augustine’s Historical Thought,” Proceedings, American Philosophical Soc. (Vol. 124, No. 4, 1980)

maenad ( MEE-nad) noun, also menad

1. Greek Mythology a woman participant in the rites of Dionysus; a Bacchante (a drunken reveler).
2. A frenzied, raging or distraught woman

Origin: 1570-80, from Latin Maenad < Greek Mainas, a bacchante, special use of mainas (genitive mainados) lit. “madwoman” , < stem of mainesthai “to rage, go mad”.

Related:
maenadic, adjective
maenadism, noun


Or his description of jigging for bluefish: ''It is not the most refined form of fishing, but there is something agreeably basic and brutish about it, and women, I have noticed, love it; it speaks to the latent maenad in them.'' –James Gorman (Reviewing “A Jerk on Ones End” by Robert Hughes), The New York Times, Dec. 26, 1999

“WHEN Elizabeth I was near 70, her grand half-century reign drawing to a close, a visitor to Hampton Court caught sight of her dancing in front of a mirror. Describing this maenad-like moment, Miss Erickson says: ''Not realizing that she was being observed, the old queen was tossing her head and stamping her feet with a crazy abandon,'' dancing away death. It is wonderful to observe her so closely. Miss Erickson notes that the dance was called the ''Spanish Panic''; and, as such, it is a fitting set of steps for a queen who had delivered her realm from the great power of the Spanish Armada and reigned in triumph as Empress of England, France, Ireland and Virginia.” -Maureen Quilligan, The New York Times, April 3, 1983

“On the same program on Sunday afternoon, Samantha Allen was a revelation as a ferocious maenad nibbling Mr. Askegard to death in Mr. Martins's ''Barber Violin Concerto,'' while Mr. Evans abducted Ms. Kistler in style.” -Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times, Jan. 29, 2000

“. . . in Greek ritual, maenadism is a benign communal negation of female adherence to the household. Seaford identifies a pattern of maenadism as it operates in Greek tragedy. Accordingly, maenadic behavior is occasioned by features such as resistance to the male.” -Vassiliki Panoussi, Ego Maenas, http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/98mtg/abstracts/panoussi.html

recommended links:
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/greece/hetairai/maenad.html (Very good/ paste it in)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maenad

fraught (frawt), comparatives(rare): fraughter, fraughtest

1. noun (Scot.): cargo, load, freight
2. tr. verb (obs): [/b]fraught, fraughted, fraughting
to load, to fill

3. adjective
a. laden, loaded, well supplied
b. full of (used with with) a trek fraught with danger
c. causing or filled with emotional distress. a fraught situation.

[c.1300, "laden" (of vessels), from M.E. fraughten "to load (a ship) with cargo," from fraght "cargo, lading of a ship," var. of freight, infl. by M.Du. vrachten "to load or furnish with cargo,". Figurative sense is first attested 1576.] -Online Etymology Dictionary

Surprisingly, this word is still used fairly often:

“The verb to ‘fraught’ = ‘burden’ is common in Shakespeare; the participle only surviving with us. ‘Freight’ and ‘fraught’ are variants of the same word.” –Augustin Daly, Arthur Wilson Verity, Twelfth Night Or, What You Will, glossary p. 143 (1895)

“I would you would make use of that good wisdom whereof I know you are fraught. . .” Shakespeare, King Lear

“Send forth your lab’ring thought;
Let it return with empty notions fraught,
Of airy columns every moment broke,
Of circling whirlpools, and spheres of smoke:
Yet this solution by't once more affords
New change of terms and scaffolding of words. –Pope

“Oh eyes! no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears. . . “ Kyd, Spanish Tragedy, 16th century

“Gulley attends a Roman Catholic boys' school in the city, and mother and son arrange secret, emotionally fraught meetings in Central Park. “ -Stephen Holden, The New York Times, May 9, 2008

“Dr. Greene's article is fraught with unarticulated values and beliefs about the nature of reality and the meaning of life.” -Letters/Opinion, The New York Times, June 4, 2008

Professor Otheguy said. ''Swearing in somebody else's language seems somehow less fraught.'' –Clyde Haberman, The New York Times, May 16, 2008

“Why has their relationship been so fraught with silences and arguments? Why has it been so difficult for them to communicate?” -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, May 20, 2008

“The beginning of De Kooning's many-splendored career is represented by increasingly fraught surfaces: the inky darks and searing whites of ''Black Friday,'' of 1948; the monstrous ''Woman'' of 1949-50 and...” – Roberta Smith, The New York Times, May 2, 2008

“. . . and it made the young Nora Kaye a star very much along Bette Davis lines: intense, fraught, compelling.” –Editorial, The New York Times, May 17, 2008

“. . . the Queens district attorney, under pressure to talk about what everyone knew would be a fraught and contentious case, told reporters, ''The case should be tried in the courtroom and not on the courthouse steps...” “ -Alan Feuer, The New York Times, April 27,2008

“Whatever attitude comes through -- and it is almost always fraught with ambiguity -- religion suffuses Mr. Clarke's realm. He demands the canvas of Genesis and upon it he enacts experiments in thought.” -Edward Rothstein, The New York Times, March 20,2008

“. . . ...for myself; it's not a question. Of course not. Which is a good thing, because the concept of race in America -- the fraught fictions of whiteness and blackness-- is not going away soon. It is still deep in our system.” -Holland Cotter, The New York Times, March 30, 2008

Picture at right: parallel canulated screws in bone

cannular or canular or canulate (CAN-yoo-ler: CAN-yoo-late) adjective

1. tubular; resembling a tube
2. having hollow tubes (as for the flow of fluids or gas)

canulated, adj.
canula or cannula, noun : (medical: a tube for insertion into the body)

These words are mostly used by those in the medical profession, but the rest of us need not shy away from them for that reason. Dandelion stems are cannular, tube-like. Bamboo can be cut into canular sections useful for making musical devices. A silver flute is canulate. If you are admitted to a hospital you will likely become the target of canulated devices : all sorts of tubes – from those supplying oxygen to those for taking blood samples. Is it ever used as a verb? Can any doctors or nurses inform us? Comments eagerly anticipated.

“Three unsuccessful attempts were made to reach fluid blood with a canular needle,
four inches long, passed directly into the tumor.” –Medical Sentinel, p. 292 (1901)

“It was not even a proper cave -- just cannular limestone walls thick with bat guano, sloping inward toward the dead end of a rock wall. He rested for a time and then clicked off the light and went hand over hand back up the face of the bluff.” -William Gay, The Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1999

“. . . which are not real hairs, although at first sight they look like it. They are really canula, open at one side, carrying the secretion of the gland already referred to. The labial development is at first sight similar to the in some Hymenoptera; but the covering of glandular and canulate hairs is quite unlike anything I have seen elsewhere, . . .” -Dr. John B. Smith, “Epipharynx and Hypopharynx of Odonata” Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1892)

“The combustion system of the Olympus 102 is of the 'cannular' type, which an earlier version of the Olympus was the first British turbojet engine to use. The combustion chamber consists of inner and outer casings forming an annular space which contains ten flame tubes.” –Bristol Siddeley Engines Ltd, Brochure, (1958)

“Using a double-cannular structure and an independent front suspension the car was offering the same driving sensations as a car from a superior class.” - http://www.carsandtuning.org/bmw-a-live-legend-part-3/

“The fact is that liposuction is a far more gentle elective surgical procedure, which removes fat cells from various parts of the body with a long thin tube called a cannula, attached to a suction apparatus inserted through tiny incisions in the skin.” -Linda Spear, New York Times, Aug. 17, 1997

cark (kahrk)

noun : worry, anxiety

verb : to burden or to be burdened with worry, or anxiety

carked adj. burdened with anxiety and worry; (slang: dead)
carking adj. burdensome, annoying
“cark it” verb, Aussie slang: to die

From Middle English carken; Old French carkier; Late Latin carcare > carricare, to load

Synonyms: unhinge, disorder, perturb, upset, inconvenience, discommode, disquiet, bother, cark, put out, incommode, disoblige, pain, disarray, throw out of kilter, trouble, disturb, trouble oneself, derange

“Cark” - never heard of it, before. It may seem archaic but is fascinating none the less. One hundred years ago it was commonly used with “cares” as in “carking cares” or “cares and carks.” I would guess that about 90% of its use was “carking cares” or “cares and carks,” until it became a tiresome cliqué. Modern usage seems to be mostly limited to being slang for ‘passing on into the great blue yonder’, however, just below in the first quotation is a wonderful modern usage.

"Crows in hundreds carking desolately from the blasted white skeletons of dead trees." Colleen McCullough; The Thorn Birds; HarperCollins Publishers; 1977.
[carking seals would be a neat usage, also. dAb]

“When Billy carked it years later though he did it in an anonymous boarding house.” -George Papaellinas, The Trip, p. 162 (2008)

“. . . we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber.” –Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Life had been too hard, for all the efforts of his love. It had silenced her emotions. But for the first time in all these years its sting had departed, the carking care of poverty, the meanness of a hard struggle for bread.” -Joseph Conrad, End of the Tether

“Clym had passed from the dullness of sorrow to the fluctuation of carking incertitude.” -Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Now, as I stood with scanty breath--for few men could have won that climb--at the top of the long defile, and the bottom of the mountain gorge all of myself, and the pain of it, and the cark of my discontent fell away into wonder and rapture.” -Richard Blackmore, Lorna Doone

Hence away, begone, begone,
Carking care and melancholy! Charles D’Orleans, North American Review, 1831

“He down did lay His heavy head, devoid of careful cark.” -Spencer

“As pulmonary consumption wastes away the body, so carking care consumes the mind.” -Ebenezer Coloham Brewer, 1878

“Peter never began to sink, till he began to doubt; that was the fruit of his carking and unbelief.” - Rev. Edward Reynolds, Bishop of Norwich, Works, p. 80, (pub. 1826)

“Carking anxiety makes a person overweeningly selfish; shuts up all the generous sympathies of the heart; and binds every thought to the wheel of this despotic monomania.” Ebenezer Coloham Brewer, A Guide to English Composition, p. 265, (1878)

The Rev. Dr. George A. Buttrick, president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, telegraphed President Roosevelt last night a pledge to seek "a world order in which unmerited poverty and carking fear and the threat of war shall be banished." The New York Times, Dec. 24, 1939

“Set your mind to live merrily, in the name of God and good folks; let no other cark nor care be harboured within the sacrosanctified domicile of your celestial brain. May the calmness and tranquility thereof be never incommodated with, or overshadowed by any frowning clouds of sullen imaginations and displeasing annoyance!” -François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

hieratic (hahy-uh-RAT-ik, hahy-RAT-ik) or heratical

1. priestly, of or used by priests
2. of the abridged form of cursive hieroglyphics used by the Egyptian priests.

From Greek hieros, sacred

Related: hieratically, adverb

“The whole room was like an apse with altar, and pure, hieratic ornament. To sleep there was a sacramental thing. Sleep there and die! one reflected.” -Edward Thomas, Autumn Thoughts, The Atlantic Monthly, September 1902

“. . . But she also incorporates awkward gesticulation with angled shoulders and extreme facial contortions, splayed hands and hieratic profiled poses.” -Roslyn Sulcas, Dance Review, The New York Times, March 29, 2008

“. . . an Andres Segovia recital. And now, at 93 years old, the pope of the Spanish guitar still attracts audiences for whom his hieratic presence seems its own reward.” –John Rockwell, The New York Times, Nov. 11, 1982

“The hieratic form of the letter m, for example, bears a striking resemblance to that of the Phoenician M. It is really a degenerated picture of an owl, which was called mulag in Egyptian, and was accordingly chosen to represent the sound of m. Little else besides the two ears and wing of the bird can be traced in the hieratic and Phoenician letters, and it is just these two ears which still survive in every M we write.” - The Library Magazine, “The Origin of the Alphabet” p. 154 (1886)

“The great repository of materials for this popular religion is the Atharva-veda, which was at the beginning not hieratic but popular.” -James Alan Montgomery, Religions of the Past and Present

http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/PMSearch/IMAGES/chert1.jpg

chert (churt) noun

1. a dull-colored flintlike quartz often found in limestone
2. other rock composed of hydrated silica with impurities

[Western British dial. for sherd, shard ]

cherty, adj. containing chert; flintlike; chertier, chertiest

A curt word, pert and to the point, good figurative uses are limited only by imagination. Mine's dull right now, how's your's?

Chert includes chalcedony, agate, jasper, and flint. Chert and flint are so alike that there is no great difference. Dark pieces are often called flint. Light colored ones are called chert. Other colors are pink, brown and purple. Arrowheads were made of chert.

“I noticed as we got in the car that the chert road had streaks of red dirt in it.” Rick Bragg, Ava’s Man, p. 258, (2002)

“A hard, brittle sedimentary rock consisting of microcrystalline quartz. It is often reddish-brown to green but can also occur in a variety of other colors, especially white, pink, brown, or black. Chert often contains impurities such as calcium, iron-oxide, or the remains of silica-rich organisms. It usually occurs as nodules in limestone and dolomite and has curved fractures. “ -The American Heritage Science Dictionary

“Chert is a common surface rock that is often a headache to farmers and gardeners as they try to work the soil. Chert also forms the bulk of the gravel bars and beds that clog our streams.” - http://www.watersheds.org/earth/chert.htm



http://www.alaskanartifacts.com/Lithics/Gray3_Chert_Group.jpg