Obloquy

Obloquy: Obloquy is speech against something. It shares it etymology with soliloquy. Obloquy also shares its etymology with obtuse, obstreperous, oppose, offend, obese, oppress, and obsess. However obloquy does not share its etymology with object, obvious, obtain, oblivion, obnoxious, obstruct, and occlude.

Sub-pornographic magazines still carry advertisements for girdles with built in cushions for inadequate arses, but generally the great quivering expanses of billowing thigh and buttock which titillated our grandfathers have fallen into obloquy.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Immure

Immure: Immure means to be imprisoned or entombed. Immure shares its etymology with mural and intramural.

When a group of girl students presented a rather churlishly expressed list of grievances to the principal of a women's college in which I had the misfortune to be immured for a whole year before I could escape, she and her cronies clung together in her Hollywood-interior lodge, refusing to deal with the matters expressed in the petition, except to complain that they wanted us to be so happy, and we had hurt them.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Gnomic

Gnomic: Gnomic, gnome, and gnostic all share the same etymology: a Greek root for knowledge. So how did gnome become little magical people, gnostic become a mystical religious movement, and gnomic become an aphorism, brief and opaque?

There pronouncements are characteristically gnomic and rigorous; to the average confused female they musty seem terrifying.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Thanatos

Thanatos: Thanatos is the Greek daemon of death, twin of the more popular daemon of sleep: Hypnos. Thantos often represents the urge to die.

Our life-style contains more thanatos than eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Opusculum

Opusculum: An opusculum is a minor work. It obviously shares its etymology with opus. However opusculum also shares its etymology with molecule, both being diminutives. The plural of opusculum is opuscula (like datum and data).

All that such an opusculum can reflect is Sarah's facility on emulation.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Etiolate

Etiolate: Etiolate means to make a green plant pale by depriving it of sunlight. Metamorphically it mean describes anything that is a paler version of reality. Etiolate does NOT share its etymology with etiology.

We no longer subscribe to the notion of the heated lust of the marriageable virgin, except in its etiolated form in the Lolita syndrome.

The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity which is the reflowering of etiolated energy.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Incommode

Incommode: Incommode means inconvenient. Incommode shares its etymology with the similarly spelled and variously defined: accommodation, commodity, commode, and accommodate. The common thread is the Latin for convenient or suitable.

In fact no little girl who finds herself bleeding from an organ which she didn't know she had until it began to incommode her feels that nature is a triumph of design and that whatever is, is right.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Prolapse

Prolapse: Prolapse (in medicine) means to move out of place. Prolapse shares it etymology obviously with relapse, elapse, and collapse, but more subtly with labile (changeable, unstable) and lava. All link back to the Latin for slip and slide.

Although few men have still to watch the horror while their wives breed themselves through miscarriage and [uterine] prolapse to death, we still have not come to terms with the sinister womb.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Etiology (variation: Aetiology)

Etiology (variation: Aetiology): The study of causes. Used often in medicine in reference to the causes of disease.

The aetiology of her case was particularly important but the word hysteria seemed to supply all the answers.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Until the causes were established, or, to use the appropriate terms, the etiology of the white evil, as, thanks to the inspiration of an imaginative assessor, this unpleasant sounding blindness came to be called, until such time as treatment and a cure might be found, and perhaps a vaccine that might prevent the appearance of any cases in the future, all the people who had turned blind, as well as those who had been in physical contact or in any way close to these patients, should be rounded up and isolated so as to avoid any further cases of contagion, which, once confirmed, would multiply more or less according to what is mathematically referred to as a compound ration.

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Atavistic

Atavistic: Atavistic refers to one relatives, something inherited. Atavistic possibly shares its etymology with avuncular (like an uncle).

Since time immemorial the womb has been associated with trouble, and some of the reluctance shown by doctors to attend to anxieties that women feel about their tricky apparatus stems from the atavistic fear.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

In 1876, his book Criminal Man presented his theory of the "atavistic" or born criminal.

... Believed that all women were biologically inferior to men and hence inherently atavistic.

A Book for Today: The Crimes of Paris by Dorothy Hoobler

With some atavistic instinct her body had moved closer and closer to the only source of heat as the room grew colder during the night.

A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme

Frangible

Frangible: Frangible means fragile or breakable. Frangible shares its etymology with: fragment, fraction, defray, refract, infringe, and fractal (among others).

If we may take the imposition of tight corsets on 'O' as any guide, we might assume that the tiny waist is chiefly valued as a point of frangibility for the female frame, so that it gratifies sadistic fantasies.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Lineament

Lineament: Lineaments are outlines or contours, and metamorphically distinguishing characteristics. Lineament shares its etymology with line and linear.

She must know her friends, her sisters, and seek in their lineaments her own.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Deliquesces

Deliquesces: Deliquesce means to dissolve, to become liquid. Deliquesce shares its etymology with liquid, liquefy, prolix, and liquor.

The most generous, tender, spontaneous relationship deliquesces into the approved mold when it avails itself of the approved buttresses, legality, security, permanence.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Appetent

Appetent: Having a strong desire. Appetent shares its etymology with appetite.

These distortions masquerade under various mythic guises, of which two follow - Romance, an account of the fantasies on which the appetent and the disappointed woman is nourished, and The Object of Male Fantasy which deals with the favorite ways in which women are presented in specifically male literature.

A Book for Today: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Memento

Memento: A memento is a remembrance or a souvenir. The Latin word shares its etymology with the Latin phrase memento mori meaning a reminder of death, or more specifically: human mortality.

Her death is the memento mori that time must also catch him at his crime.

A Book for Today: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

Virginal

Virginal: A virginal is a simple harpsichord - a keyboard instrument where the strings are plucked. The etymology is metamorphic and related to the sound (a virgin's voice), the music (in praise of the Virgin Mary) or expected performers (virgins).

The candles are lit, the tables spread with linen, and Henrika has seated herself at the virginal.

A Book for Today: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

Pilaster

Pilaster: A rectangular column, most often constructed against a wall with only a portion visible.

To the other side, opening off the salon, a small garden, Italianate in design, with pebbled paths and orderly plantings, and pilasters at regular intervals surmounted by granite balls.

A Book for Today: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

Stroppy

Stroppy: A stroppy person is unreasonably grumpy, belligerent, and obstreperous.

She was considered a stroppy child - sullen, secretive, and ordinary.

A Book for Today: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

Sorry, I'm a stroppy old cow lately.

Age hadn't tempered Serrimissani's stroppiness.

A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss

Recruit

Recruit: Recruit means to increase either in numbers or in health and strength. The latter definition was evidently popular in the 19th century where it was used by several journalists traveling to California. Recruit shares it etymology with crescent and crescendo, but only crescendo directly hints at the root meaning of increase. Crescent refers to the crescent moon, a waxing (increasing) moon.

We will stay here a few days to recruit our stock [cattle, horses and oxen].

A Book for Today: Ho for California edited by Sandra L Myers