https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glacis

Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe

If only he could turn back, not even cross the threshold of the Fort but ride back down to the plain, to his own city, to his old habits. Such was Drogo’s first thought; and, however shameful such weakness in a soldier, he was ready to confess to it, if necessary, provided they let him go at once. But from the invisible north a thick cloud was rising over the glacis and imperturbably the sentries walked up and down under the high sun. Drogo’s horse whinnied. Then the great silence fell once more.

It is in passages where he suffers from the obsession of his theory, instead of enjoying its usufruct, that Mr. More appears, as I have said, to be lacking in the qualities of detachment and grace.

​

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1906/10/mores-shelburne-essays/639145/

A man cannot have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous at the same time; and if he be imaginative as well as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the amount of his imagination. It is perfectly true that what we call the world, in these affairs, is nothing more than a mere Brocken spectre, the projected shadow of ourselves; but as long as we do not know it, it is a very passable giant.

Wiktionary: synonym for "mountain spectre" which is: An optical phenomenon sometimes seen on the summits of mountains when the observer is between the Sun and a mass of cloud or fog. The figures of the observer and surrounding objects are seen projected on the cloud, greatly enlarged and often encircled by rainbow colours.

We invent ourselves as American writers—it’s not a clerisy we’re born into—and we each have to figure out how to create a path to our work. --Edward Hirsch, introduction to The Heart of American Poetry

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clerisy

Lempiere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfork

... the *Nottingham* sat low and profitable in the water which carried her inland. Her timbers were sound, had weathered well, the futtock hoops still tight, pumps barely used.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/futtock

Florio's Montaigne, almost the first sentence:

Edward the black Prince of Wales (who so long governed our Country of Guienne, a man whose conditions and fortune were accompanied with many notable parts of worth and magnanimitie) having beene grievously offended by the Limosins, though he by maine force tooke and entered their Citie, could by no meanes be appeased, nor by the wailefull out-cries ofall sorts of people (as of men, women, and children) be moved to any pittty, they prostrating themselves to the common slaughter, crying for mercy, and humbly submitting themselves at his feet, until such time as in triumphant manner passing thorow their Citie, he perceived three French Gentlemen, who alone, with an incredible and undaunted boldnesse gainstood the enraged violence, and made head against the furie of his victorious armie.

Ulysses:

But wait till I tell you, he said. Delahunt of Camden street had the catering and yours truly was chief bottlewasher. Bloom and the wife were there. Lashings of stuff we put up: port wine and sherry and curacoa to which we did ample justice. Fast and furious it was. After liquids came solids. Cold joints galore and mince pies...

I was looking for meaning of "blind house" in Lawrence Durrell's Black Book (talking about someone laboring over a large map of London):

Lobo is as much of an enigma to me as this fantastic locality of blind houses and smoke which he is drawing must be to him.

And I wasn't sure if it meant no windows or what (and I still amn't)

When I googled I found someone asking the same question in The East Anglican: Notes and queries on Subjects Connected wtih the Counties of Suffolk, Cambridge, Essex and Norfolk from 1904:

The terms used in byegone days to describe prison houses are curious. A prison in the Tower was called “ Little Ease,” and a singularly uncomfortable dungeon at the Bishop of Lincoln’s Palace at Woburn possessed a like fascinating designation. A place in the London Guildhall for unruly apprentices was similarly known. A “Little Ease,” in Chester Jail, was known as “the hole in the Rock.” In Colchester the place of incarceration, in which the Quakers were laid. was called “the Oven.” In Launceston Jail it was “ Doomsdale." At Dorchester the Quakers made the acquaintance of “the Blind House”. At Reading, a hundred years earlier, Palmer the Martyr, with a fellow prisoner, was committed to what Foxe calls “the comfortable hostry of the blind house” (Acts and jifonnments, vol. viii., pp. 213, 217, Pratt’s edition). Presumably the "blind house” was either a place with a dark or blind entry, having but one opening, or it was lacking in light, probably having windows high up. The expression, “blind alley” (having no outlet), may be adduced by way of illustration. The term, “blind house,” does not appear to be included in any dictionary of local and other phrases. Can any reader of the East Anglian give an instance of local use of the expression?

The castle was obdurate, the only detail not executed by Turner. In the valley a line of osiers flinched at the least breath of air.

Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, ch 9

“Maybe she feels beleaguered in the castle.” They smiled to imagine Tertia on the battlements, peering glassily from behind machicolations.

From Shirley Hazzard, the Transit of Venus, ch 9

I had to look these up, or thought they were interesting, but don't have an interesting citation. Pleases suggest any others.

cenotaph * cataphract

Unfortunately Dora has had to go to Wigmore Street to pick up her new glasses. Thank God. It was clear that Dora battened on the girls’ occasions, might be absent from necessity but never from tact. As in the concert hall, it was evident they must make the most of the time before she returned, get things to a pitch where she could not reverse them. In relief at no Dora, Christian sat easy, had a second cup, and was pleased.

Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus chapter 3. The sentence here seems to me a rough-sounding comma splice, and wants either a comma after Dora or an "and" before "might"

This bizarre word is used in Scott Walker's masterful song SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter). The context is this:

For Lavinia

Who goes like gynozoon

IX, I, V, IX, III, V, I

For the citizen

Whose joke lays in their hand

I, V, I, V, IX, IX, III

To play fugues

On Jove's Spam castanets

V, IX, IX, I, VI, IX, I

Ever since I saw this word a few years back I've not been able to stop thinking about it. This is mainly because I'm not sure it's a real word. Well, I'm sure it's real enough. But that's by far the most irritatingly intriguing degree of existence: to be real-ish.

I first saw the definition in a Genius.com annotation for the song in question, which reads:

"Gynozoon is an obscure Roman mythological beast trained to have sex with humans."

However, if you google the word. . . it comes up empty. Further, I have friends who are trained classicists and have responded only with mild disgust when I ask them the veracity of this word. No luck there.

But then I found a passage from a book called Pig Island by Mo Hayder (some sort of crime thriller book) on Google Books in which the word gynozoon is used in the following context:

"A Roman obsession this, a gynozoon was a female animal trained for sex with a human male."

The only thing is, this book actually cites where this piece of information came from: The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love. But upon checking this book I couldn't find the word 'gynozoon'. I got an epub version and searched that. And then in desperation, I started searching variations: gynozone, ginozoon, etc. Words that didn't even vaguely work on an etymological level. Eventually though, I managed to find it: gynezoon:

"*ANDROZOONS: Androzoons are male animals that are trained for sex with humans. Animals trained for men are gynezoons. Many are only trained for oral sex (zoolinction) and this is done by putting their favorite food on a person's genitals. There are also professionals who train androzoons for other individuals.

Two thousand years ago androzoons were used in the Constantinople Amphitheater to rape and sometimes kill victims for the amusement of the crowds. The most common were apes, bulls, cheetahs, dogs, giraffes, wild boars, and zebras. Theodora, the daughter of one of these trainers, married the Roman Emperor Justinian. She evidently trained some of her own animals as she was notorious for a stage performance in which she laid on her back with her legs raised and her genitals facing the audience. Theodora's assistants would then drop kernels or grain into her open vagina. Her trained geese were then allowed to come onto the stage and pick the kernels out with their beaks (Perverse Crimes in History, p. 49).*"

This book came out in 1992, which predates Scott's song by two decades. Though I'm somewhat doubtful as to the word's veracity. For one, she repeats this tale about Theodora, but from my own studies of the Byzantine laws revolving around insult and slander I have been reliably informed by classicists that tales as extreme as these regarding Theodora were completely untrue (and at the time there were many many more disgusting and over-the-top tales about her).

Regardless, Love's book is as far back as I was able to trace the word. However, the word 'androzoon' does go back a bit further. On www.definition-of.com the word is defined as:

"According to John Trimble ( 5000 Adult Sex Words and Phrases . 1966): ' A male animal which has been specially trained to perform sexual intercourse with a woman.'"

I couldn't find a copy of that book, so for now that's where the trail runs cold. I think, though this is completely unfounded, Brenda Love read the word 'androzoon' and decided there should be a female counterpart, so just used the logical 'gyneco-' prefix to replace 'andro-'. But there are still a lot of questions for me. For instance, why does a word which etymologically should just mean a female animal come to have a sexual connotation? Why was it changed to gynozoon by Mo Hayder? (It could just be a mistake.) Why did the Genius.com annotation add the word 'mythological'? (Maybe just an aimless embellishment, or perhaps they were alluding to the general vagueness of the word).

The only question I don't have is: Why did Scott Walker use this word? Because he's Scott Fucking Walker, that's why.

From Clifford Geertz's essay, "Being There"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/preterite

All of this may rather remind one of the lady professor of “creative writing” in Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution, who divided people into “authors” and “people,” and the authors were people and the people weren’t. But within anthropology it is hard to deny the fact that some individuals, whatever you call them, set the terms of discourse in which others thereafter move—for a while anyway and in their own manner. Our whole subject is differentiated, once one looks past the conventional rubrics of academic life, in such terms. Boas, Benedict, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Murdock, Evans-Pritchard, Griaule, Levi-Strauss, to keep the list short, preterite, and variegated, point not just to particular works (Patterns of Culture, Social Structure, or La Pensee Sauvage), but to whole ways of going at things anthropological: they mark off the intellectual landscape, differentiate the discourse field. That is why we tend to discard their first names after a while and adjectivize their last ones: Boasian, or Griauliste, or, in a sardonic coinage of Talcott Parsons’s (himself something of a Barthes auteur in sociology) that I have always rather fancied, Benedictine anthropology.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gangue

Mason & Dixon, Ch. 41:

once you nave felt the invisible Grasp of the Magnetic, or gazed, unto transport, as the Gangue falls away before the veined and billowing molten light, oh the blinding purity. . . .

Someone who in different Costume might easily be taken for a Pirate of

the Century past, gives Mason the up-and-down. “New one on me, Cap’n. The diff’rently-siz’d Eye-balls suggest a life spent peeing into small Op’nings. Yet he’s not a Bum-bailiff, nor a bum’s assisstant,– lacks that, what you would call, cool disinterest.”

Mason & Dixon, Ch 40, pg. 401

I like the Oxford definition:

derogatory, historical

A bailiff empowered to collect debts or arrest debtors for nonpayment.

Origin

Early 17th century: from bum, so named because of the association of an approach from behind.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/full_marks

Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction:

"although Watt is a far more careful

reader than most of the critics quoted earlier, he still finds himself forced to deny Fielding full marks on the sole ground of his deficiency in formal realism. “Few readers would like to be Without the prefatory chapters, or Fielding’s diverting asides, but they undoubtedly derogate from the reality of the narrative”

a tergo means "from behind" and now is generally used of sexual positions. Did you know that in the early 20th century kids often imagined seeing their parents doing it doggy-style? here's the evidence -- google "A Note on the Childish Theory of Coitus a Tergo" if the link dies. . . anyway, here's what made me look it up -- from the beginning of Stalky and Company by Rudyard Kipling:

“*Now *we can get straight down through the furze, and never show up at all,” said the tactician. “Beetle, go ahead and explore. Snf! Snf! Beastly stink of fox somewhere!”

On all fours, save when he clung to his spectacles, Beetle wormed into the gorse, and presently announced between grunts of pain that he had found a very fair fox-track. This was well for Beetle, since Stalky pinched him a tergo.

wiktionary

From Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon, ch 33, p. 328

Tho’ all are welcome here, Janvier's, like certain counterparts in Philadelphia, has ever provided a venue for the exercise of Proprietarian politics, by a curious assortment of City Anglicans and Presbyterians, with renegade Germans or Quakers appearing from time to time. Especially upon nights before and after Voting, the Rooms contain a great Ridotto of hopeful Cupidity. Strangers are view’d suspiciously. Mr. Franklin’s confusion is toasted more than once. Rumors circulate that the Anti-Proprietarians have a Jesuit Device for seeing and hearing thro’ Walls.

monachal: adj. monastic

From introduction to Gargantua:

. . . it is not the habit makes the monk, many being monasterially accoutred, who inwardly are nothing less than monachal, and that there are of those that wear Spanish capes, who have but little of the valour of Spaniards in them.

Usually a term from botany, it means permanently attached to a substrate -- thew way an oyster or coral is attached.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sessile

Auden uses is in the poem Circe, quoted at the beginning of Byatt's Babel Tower. About 60s flower child/hippies:

She does not brutalize her victims (beasts could

bite or bolt). She simplifies them to flowers,

sessile fatalists, who don’t mind and only

can talk to themselves.

chine normally means the backbone of the animal and seems to be a term of art in butchery. I found it applied to humans in the first selection in Bohemians Booleggers Flappers & Swells, a collection of pieces from Vanity Fair 1914-1936. I found a couple similar usages from the late 1800s in Google books. It's applied to humans in terms of violent combat, to achieve brutal vividness - regarding people as meat.

Wodehouse is complaining about people doing daily calisthenics and strengthening exercises:

The monotony of doing these exercises every morning is so appalling

that it is practically an impossibility not to boast of having gone through with them. Many a man who has been completely reticent on the topic of his business successes and his social achievements has become a mere babbler after completing a month of physical culture without missing a day. It is the same spirit which led Vikings in the old days to burst into song when they had succeeded in cleaving some tough foeman to the chine.

In google, I found this very similar phrasing in Ovingdean Grange: A Tale of the South Downs By William Harrison Ainsworth, from 1882, where it seems likely Wodehouse lifted the pairing with "foeman" (great writers steal):

Captiain Stelfax was a man of middle size, heavily built, square

set, and very muscular, and endowed with such prodigious strength of arm, that, like a knight of old, he could cleave a foeman to the chine.

I also found, from 1892, A. D. Crake:

The monk soldier smiled. "And how wouldst thou attempt to convert the infidel?" "At the first blasphemy he uttered I would cut him down, cleave him to the chine.

Both Crake and Ainsworth wrote historical fiction.

bolus, pl boluses or boli, n., A round mass of something, especially of chewed food in the mouth or alimentary canal. (wiktionary)

Usage 1 of 2: Colin Burrow on Peter Green's Iliad

Things happen repeatedly, then suddenly they differ. That rhythm of action, which combines repetition with asymmetry, is the rhythm of Homeric narrative and of the Homeric style. And it is designed to hold you in its spell as much as the rhythm of a line: the beat of repetition tells you this must happen, then, behold a wonder, it does not. The moments when (perhaps) lines or episodes have been added to the poem, or when material inconsistencies occur, shouldn’t simply be regarded as boluses of inauthenticity. They are, for a reader of the received text (which would include every epic poet in the Western tradition), part of the magic. This is a world in which spears can sometimes be in two places at once.

Usage 2 of 2: Karen Russell in Swamplandia!, Ch. 14

The party was catered by the girls who worked in the Dorsal Flukes, who had stolen a bunch of pizzas and soggy boluses of garlic loaf after their shift ended.

crank from the Sea Talk dictionary www.seatalk.info:

Describing a sailboat that heels easily in a breeze and will swamp or capsize if the sheets and helm are not carefully tended.

That's the same definition, word-for-word, as "tender" in the same dictionary.

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, chapter 8, Hunting:

He sailed a rough chopping sea above which clouds drooped and drifted in vast mournful veils. He raised no magewind now but used the world's wind, which blew keen from the northwest; and so long as he maintained the substance of his spell-woven sail often with a whispered word, the sail itself set and turned itself to catch the wind. Had he not used that magic he would have been hard put to keep the crank little boat on such a course, on that rough sea.

Per wikipedia, Glasshouse was the name of a specific prison, and was over time applied to any military prison; now it is in disuse, and I didn't see the term in the few online dictionaries I looked at.

Naples '44, p. 57

... a girl of Madonna-like grace in Acerra who had most foolishy applied to marry a guardsman at present serving six months in the glasshouse....

insentience: the lack of capability for having feelings or understanding - the opposit of sentience.

Doerr, The Shell Collector

Under a microscope, the shell collector had been told, the teeth of certain cones look long and sharp, like tiny translucent bayonets, the razor-edged tusks of a miniature ice-devil. The proboscis slips out the siphonal canal, unrolling, the barbed teeth spring forward. In victims the bite causes a spreading insentience, a rising tide of paralysis. First your palm goes horribly cold, then your forearm, then your shoulder. The chill spreads to your chest. You can’t swallow, you can’t see. You burn. You freeze to death.

septic: adj., causing sepsis - sepsis is a serious medical condition in which the whole body is inflamed; sepsis is from the Greek for putrification.

It was only a matter of time, the shell collector knew, before something terrible would happen. He had nightmares about finding a corpse bobbing in the wavebreak, bloated with venom. Sometimes it seemed to him that the whole sea had become a tub of poison harboring throngs of villains. Sand eels, stinging corals, sea snakes, crabs, men-of-war, barracuda, mantas, sharks, urchins— who knew what septic tooth would next find skin?

Doerr, Anthony The Shell Collector: Stories, from the title story.

extemporaneous doggerel on liquorish mean "lecherous"

Most often when you see it, it's spelled more suggestively

"suggesting what?" you ask? Well, beginning L-I-C

A wanton K adorning, followed stammeringly by "er"

A verb or substantive? your choice. Either way, it's most impure.

Tom Jones, Book V, Ch 12:

. . . "what! have you been fighting for a wench?"—"Ask the gentleman in his waistcoat there," said Thwackum: "he best knows." "Nay then," cries Western, "it is a wench certainly.—Ah, Tom, Tom, thou art a liquorish dog...."

From "Ithaca" in Joyce's Ulysses. I'm going to post the whole paragraph because it is so silly and beautiful.

"With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellation?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster : of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee : of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth : of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57, 000, 000, 000, 000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet : of Arcturus : of the precession of equinoxes : of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained : of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901 : of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules : of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threscore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity."

Oh, Joyce.