malison /mal-i-zən/. noun. A curse. A malediction. The opposite of a benison. From Old French maleiçon (curse, to speak ill).
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meatus
meatus /mee-AYT-əs/. noun. A natural bodily passageway or its opening, such as the external auditory meatus (the ear). From Latin meātus (passage), from meāre (to go, pass).
“He has an arrival routine where he skips the front entrances and comes in through the south side’s acoustic meatus and gets a Millennial Fizzy® out of the vending machine…” (David Foster Wallace)
“…in the meantime, come to Paris and you will find me, headphones plugged tight in my external audio meatus, walking the quays…” (David Sedaris)
“He had produced a razor from some abyssal pocket and was lovingly whittling a live match. This when pointed according to his God he used to pierce a deep meatus in a fresh cigar…” (Samuel Beckett)
“Or they may instead be mentioned, as I shall this moment mention ‘swive,’ a term which Barth has beautifully blown his breath upon and thus attempted to revive. I, myself, have had no success with ‘grampalingus,’ ‘meatus foetus,’ or ‘mulogeny’—a sentence which, if you could not see the quotes around the words you might think meant I’d tried them all and failed. Well, no one listens to what they see.” (William H. Gass)
marmoreal
marmoreal /mar-MOR-ee-əl/. adjective. Resembling or made of marble. Cold, hard and smooth. If I spun wax, I’d be DJ Marmoreal. From Latin marmor (marble).
“Eyes brimming o’er and brow bowed down with lovey
Marmoreal neck and bosom uberous…
(Robert Browning)
“And to my surprise, I was comforted. Somehow, the great Nobodaddy in the sky reached down a marmoreal hand and laid it on my burning brow and soothed me.” (John Banville)
“God, she looked huge. Her crimson, purple wings, in flight, obscured the roof-tree of the Imperial Circus. Yet those marmoreal, immense arms and legs of hers, as they made leisurely, swimming movements through the air, looked palely unconvincing, as if arbitrarily tacked on to the bird attire.” (Angela Carter)
“I am always the youngest; the most naïvely surprised; the one who runs in advance in apprehension and sympathy with discomfort or ridicule — should there be a smut on a nose, or a button undone. I suffer for all humiliations. Yet I am also ruthless, marmoreal.” (Virginia Woolf)
“Menard’s true friends have greeted that catalog with alarm, and even with a degree of sadness. One might note that only yesterday were we gathered before his marmoreal place of rest, among the dreary cypresses, and already Error is attempting to tarnish his bright Memory…” (Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley)
“She doesn’t consider them suitable for wedging clay, with their puny little biceps and match-stick wrists, so poorly developed compared with her own solid, smoothly muscled arms and broad, capable but shapely hands, so often admired by the poets. Marmoreal, one of them said – wrote, actually – causing Loulou to make one of her frequent sorties into the dictionary, to find out whether or not she’d been insulted.” (Margaret Atwood)
“Who is the man? The body is as perfectly formed as a god’s. But it gives off such marmoreal coldness that it is impossible a child in its grasp could not be chilled to the bone. As for the face, the face will not be seen.” (J.M. Coetzee)
“This poem—‘Death & Co.’—is about the double or schizophrenic nature of death—the marmoreal coldness of Blake’s death mask, say, hand in glove with the fearful softness of worms, water and the other katabolists. I imagine these two aspects of death as two men, two business friends, who have come to call.” (Sylvia Plath)
Elsewhere: Wordnik.
myrmidon
myrmidon /MəR-mu-dən/. noun. In Greek myth, a member of the warrior tribe who accompanied Achilles to Troy. In more common use, a bodyguard, an assistant, a servant. A member of a posse, a gang-member, a ruffian, a hired thug who follows any order without question. Most broadly, a hanger-on, an opportunist. From Latin Myrmidones/Greek Myrmidones (the tribe), possibly derived from Greek mormos (dread, terror).
“Erskine-Brown and a Mr Thrower, his sedate solicitor, found the Kitten-A-Go-Go, paid a sinister-looking myrmidon at the door ten quid each by way of membership and descended to a damp and darkened basement where two young ladies were chewing gum and removing their clothes with as much enthusiasm as they might bring to the task of licking envelopes.” (John Mortimer)
“The King made a sign and the sages heard the iron step of the myrmidons that surrounded them at the foot of the throne, and whose naked swords did gleam like flame.” (Stanislaw Lem)
“…I would die in this bed as if paralyzed, or be shot to death here on this pillow by the tireless myrmidons whose eyes miss nothing.” (Heinrich Boll)
“She smiles. He sees upside down her mouth, with lips pressed shut, flex like a myrmidon’s small-bow being drawn…” (John Banville)
“No, Arthur, no, it is not so; I am now one of the myrmidons of that most special of special pleaders, Mr. Neversaye Die. I have given myself over to the glories of a horse-hair wig…” (Anthony Trollope)
“…since Calabria was largely spared the bombardments that had destroyed archives in other parts of Italy and the post-war government had promptly rehired Mussolini’s officially disgraced myrmidons to curate the surviving ones, unravelling the history of the Intrieri clan proved much less difficult than might have been the case elsewhere.” (Michael Dibdin)
“And here was I, not only supposed to haul a prominent grain broker out of his office immediately upon his return from a week’s absence, but also headed for a revelation to the District Attorney that would probably result in my having the pleasure of meeting H. R. Corbett or some other flatfooted myrmidon in the anteroom of E. D. Kimball’s office – and wouldn’t that have been nice?” (Rex Stout)
“…for Malvolio’s nose is no whipstock, my lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses.” (William Shakespeare)
“I’m Shawn Spencer,” Shawn said. “I’m a private detective. And this is my henchman, Bertie O’Myrmidon. Or he’s my myrmidon, Bertie O’Henchman. I keep getting that confused.” (William Rabkin)
mimp
mimp /MIMP/. noun or verb. An affected pursing of the lips. An overly prim look. To act in an overly precise, fussy manner. Origin uncertain: the OED states that it may derive from mim, which itself is though perhaps, to be “imitative of the action of pursing up the mouth.”
“She took up her book and began so prettily, and so sensibly, where another miss would have mimp’d.” (Hester Lynch Thrale)
“Paphian Mimp, a certain plie of the lips, considered needful for ‘the highly genteel.’ Lady Emily told Miss Alscrip, ‘the heiress,’ that it was acquired by placing one’s self before a looking-glass, and repeating continually the words ‘nimini pimini;’ ‘when the lips cannot fail to take the right plie.'” (John Burgoyne)
“Look at she a-settin’ up ther, mimpin!, idling, playing the fine lady.” (George Dartnell)
“I am so teased and so lectured by the old folks that I sit mimpetty mimp before them merely for peace sake…” (Charlotte Smith)
mooncalf
mooncalf /MOON-kaf/. noun. An unholy fool, a dolt, a simpleton. An ill-conceived enterprise. In older usage a mooncalf might refer to a deformed animal or some misbegotten monster, based on the folk superstition that abortive fetuses (of cows and people) were the product of the moon’s influences. Also, now thankfully obsolete, a uterine mole or tumor.
“The potion works not on the part design’d,
But turns his brain, and stupifies his mind;
The sotted moon-calf gapes”
(Martial, translated by Dryden, from Juvenal’s Satires)
“…a very big man came into the room carrying a can of beer. He had a doughy mooncalf face, a tuft of fuzz on top of an otherwise bald head, a thick brutal neck and chin, and brown pig eyes…” (Raymond Chandler, from “The King in Yellow”)
“In his pockets, it turned out, puppets were tucked, with strings and bars. A wistful female child, a wolfman with a snarling smile and a fur coat, a strange mooncalf, luminous green with huge eyes.” (A.S. Byatt, from The Children’s Book)
“We recruited fools for the show. We had spots for a number of fools (and in the big all-fool number that occurs immediately after the second act, some specialties). But fools are hard to find. Usually they don’t like to admit it. We settled for gowks, gulls, mooncalfs. A few babies, boobies, sillies, simps. A barmie was engaged, along with certain dum-dums and beefheads. A noodle. When you see them all wandering around, under the colored lights, gibbering and performing miracles, you are surprised.” (Donald Barthelme, from “The Flights of Pigeons from the Palace”)
meraki
meraki /me-RAH-kee/. adjective. A Greek word used to describe doing or making something with great passion, soul, ardor, and creativity. The absorptions and intense enthusiasm when focused on a particular, creative activity. Often (wrongly) called an “untranslatable.” In modern Greek script: μεράκι. From Turkish merak (curiosity, whim, passion). See also: kefi and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow.
“Every kind of work has this meraki, this…it has a beauty, a…creativity, how can I describe this to you? It’s…even the cook, when he makes a good meal…I, when I cook, I know that…the pot’s on the fire and I can’t read, I keep getting up all the time, tak!, to go and see, you know, how it’s doing.” (Andreas Nenedakis, as cited in Portrait of a Greek Imagination).
“The long-term appearance of boredom and disengagement may be reproduced in a fully socialized artisan as the nonchalant skill of one who does not need to think about what he is doing in order to do it successfully. It is not that he is indifferent; on the contrary, his nonchalance is the product of his Meraki, his love for the craft, which is such that he neither cares about the jibes of others nor feels diminished by his own missteps…” (Michael Herzfeld, from The Body Impolitic)