steenth /STEENTH/. adjective. The latest in an indefinitely long series. Derived from “sixteenth” > from Old English siextēne (six and ten) and still used that way in stock trading, where it refers to 1/16 of a point in price. See also: umpteenth.
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seraglio
seraglio /se-RAHL-yoh/. noun. An enclosure used for confinement, most often for a harem or polygamous unit. For Muslim nobles, the rooms or apartments reserved for wives and concubines. Or the harem itself. Sometimes, more generally, a Muslim noble house or palace as a whole. Sometimes, more generally, a brothel. From Italian serraglio(an enclosure or animal cage), from Latin sera (door bar), related to Turkish seray(palace).
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scrivello
scrivello /skri-VEL-oh/. noun. A small elephant tusk weighing “less than 20 lb,” according to the OED or “of a small size commonly used for making billiard balls” by Merriam-Webster. Likely from the Portuguese, a variant of escaravelho (pin, peg).
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sough
sough /SOW/. noun or verb. The sighing sound of wind or water; a murmuring or humming. To make such a sound, to draw a deep breath. Also, to preach or pray in a hypocritical manner. Or to whine. Or even a drain or sewer. From Old English onomatopoeic verb swōgan (to resound; to rustle), related to swēgnjan (sigh).
“We laughed happily, and for a moment all the harbour noises stopped at once, so that we heard the sough and lap of the green water against the quay steps.” (Malcolm Lowry)
“As winds pass through leaves, deep and visible undulations of felicity passed through those who lay in the grass. We could hear the sough of dreamers who did not sleep.” (Nick Tosches)
“I have heard nothing but the sough of the sea
And wide upon the open sea my friend
The sea-wind crying, out of its cave to roam
No more, no more … until my memory
Swung you back like a lock…”
(John Berryman)
“When the racket was lost a moment, only a cosmic sigh; they heard the sough of time and space, the wave poised over everything.” (Nadine Gordimer)
“…a Certain Person who has bequeathed his children a caravan of fractions, and chatted, to the accompaniment of the nocturnal sough of trees, about something extremely domestic and silly, but therefore all the more awful…” (Vladimir Nabokov)
“This is the silver lining of
Pathetic fallacies: the soughOf Populus that taps at last
Not water but the author’s past.”
(Vladimir Nabokov)
“At night Coyle listened, the wind wrapping a sough around the keening timbers of the ship and the grim sound of the stricken.” (Paul Lynch)
“…the shouts of the bathers and of children at play, punctuating like the cries of sea-birds the sough of the gently breaking waves…” (Marcel Proust)
“Why should that trace not be what would, in a human or a Chelgrian, be a perfectly natural predisposition towards boredom caused by the sheer grinding relentlessness of their celebrated altruism and a weakness for the occasional misdemeanour; a dark, wild weed of spite in the endless soughing golden fields of their charity?” (Iain M. Banks)
scurf
scurf /skərf/. noun. Scaly dry flakes of skin. Any encrustation or flaky, scaly deposit on a surface. The “foul” remains when something adhesive is removed. Rarely: a contemptible person. Also: a sea trout. Probably derived from Old English sceorfan (to gnaw) and scearfian (to cut into shreds).
“Guy offered up his delicate and increasingly emotional nostrils to a familiar experience: the scurfy smell of old money.” (Martin Amis)
“Here I sit, naked under my prison garb, wads of pallid flesh trussed and bagged like badly packaged meat. I get up and walk around on my hind legs, a belted animal, shedding an invisible snow of scurf everywhere I move.” (John Banville)
“I have no heart to be left behind, not even
if Zeus himself would swear to scrape away
the scurf of age and make me young again…”
(Homer, translated by Robert Fagles)
“They were young men, subalterns, well set-up, their metal ashine and their black unmaculated by hairs, scurf or food-droppings.” (Anthony Burgess)
“In the distance before him a fire burned on the prairie, a solitary flame frayed by the wind that freshened and faded and shed scattered sparks down the storm like hot scurf blown from some unreckonable forge howling in the waste.” (Cormac McCarthy)
“Remove the scurf spots, and broil the same as given above. Use plenty of butter.” (Mary Ronald)
“After all perhaps I knew nothing of mother Molloy, or Mollose, save in so far as such a son might bear, like a scurf of placenta, her stamp.” (Samuel Beckett)
“Stanley Spencer anticipates with relish the droppings in all his pockets, the scorched stink of wheat bunt, the dark odor of blight, mealy mildew, the reek of fomes and juniper conk, of black punk rot, potato scald, bruised galls, and scurf.” (Guy Davenport)
“Already I was wondering what makes them
hunger so, for the cause of their leanness and sad
scurf was not yet manifest”
(Dante Alighieri)
“Wild heights untravelled of the wind, and vales
Cloven seaward by their violent streams, and white
With bitter flowers and bright salt scurf of brine”
(Algernon Charles Swinburne)
“There stood a hill not far whose grisly top
Belched fire and rolling smoke; the rest entire
Shone with a glossy scurf, undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic ore…”
(John Milton)
shivaree (charivari)
shivaree (charivari) /SHIV-ə-ree/. noun. Originally, a mock serenade using pots, pans and whatever was at hand to disapprove of a marriage or wedding. More generally, a cacophany of sound, a din, a discordant medley. Shivaree is a corruption of the French charivari, from Greek karebaria (headache), derived from kare (head) + barys (heavy).
“She turned on all the horrors of the ‘Battle of Prague’, that venerable shivaree, and waded chin deep in the blood of the slain.” (Mark Twain)
“The staple figure in novels is the man of aplomb, who sits, among the young aspirants and desperates, quite sure and compact, and, never sharing their affections or debilities, hurls his word like a bullet when occasion requires, knows his way and carries his points. […] But we for the most part are all drawn into the charivari; we chide, lament, cavil and recriminate.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“So it went: the succession of film fragments on the tube, the progressive removal of clothing that seemed to bring her no nearer nudity, the boozing, the tireless shivaree of voices and guitars from out by the pool.” (Thomas Pynchon)
“How can a body be made from the word?–language, a
shivaree of transparence-jigsaw-glass immensity”
(Robin Blaser)
“…wondering if she’d forgotten scooping you out of it, whispering, Shh shh, shh, going tiptoe barefoot past the La-Z-Boy, the shivaree of snore and static, the stink of whiskey and cigarettes.” (David Bradley)
“But that following Saturday was the night it first appeared all our fortunes were changing. There was a big crowd of miners and they were feeling the season, their carryings-on was not just a bit of fun, it was liken to a shivaree.” (E.L. Doctorow)
scumble
scumble /SKUM-bəl/. verb or noun. To soften the colors of a painting or other work of art by applying a thin coat or layer of opaque or near-opaque color. The effect of this process. Scumble is a frequentative (a form expressing repetition) of the verb scum (in its older sense meaning to clear, to skim), whose origin is unknown.
“‘Eschew surplusage,’ snapped Twain, that anti-European, anti-Catholic pinchfist from the American midwest, with his unlovely spray of scentless botanicals. Blink the incidentals! Fract that chicken! Scumble that depth-of-field! Rip off that wainscotting! Slubber that gloss! Steam down those frills!” (Alexander Theroux)
“But this wasn’t that flat, affectless Pop thing, the Brillo box, the soup can. If anything, it was the opposite: a stop-sign whose unique scumble of urban grit—whose peeling green pole, textured upon the canvas, whose reflection of morning light near a river in summer—made William want to cry.” (Garth Hallberg)
“I felt secretly sure any other teacher would kill all that was strangest and most luminous in her playing. That scumbled virtuosity of the nonnative speaker wouldn’t survive her first real lesson.” (Richard Powers)
“In this preliminary report on infinite consciousness a certain scumbling of the essential outline is unavoidable. We have to discuss sight without being able to see.” (Vladimir Nabokov)
“The desert moves out on half the horizon
Rimming the illusory water which, among islands,
Bears up the sky. The sea scumbles in
From its own inviolate border under the sky.
(Galway Kinnell)
“Consider this sky. Supposedly it is blue; we say, Pierrot stands outlined against a blue sky. In fact, what blue there is is more a faded, bluish green, and the effect is further softened by a scumbling of ochreous pinks.” (John Banville)
“And he, Abraham, was a painter, splendid-but need the walls of the house be filled top-to-bottom with nude portraits of his wife? Need the paintings in the front parlor sometimes be visible from the corner of Dean and Nevins, scumbled flesh beaming past half-drawn curtains?” (Jonathan Lethem)
“a horizonless pattern of small dark patches that were forest a little darker than the canopy of cloud, and small patches a little lighter and yellower than the cloud that were rolling withered winter fields under a thin scumble of rime: the high Bavarian plateau, stretching away into purple immensities under a purplish slate sky.” (Richard Hughes)