rasorial /rə-SOR-ee-əl/. adjective. Scratching at the ground or scratching more generally. Originally and primarily used for describing birds. From the scientific Latin Rasores, used to describe an order of birds that scratch the ground for food. From Latin rāsor (scraper).
“They looked toward the door, saw only the paunchy guest of the evening moving toward it, in an unsteady rasorial attitude as though following a trail of crumbs to the great world outside.” (William Gaddis)
“Otherwise I’ll be a rich jailbird. But even if I hung around I wouldn’t see much of it. With two rasorial ex-wives—the Skanks from Hell are both well practiced at deficit financing—and a third who spends like the Hilton sisters, and three kids with college funds…” (F. Paul Wilson)
“I read somewhere of the remarkable optimism of a flea which a man found on his foot after crossing the desert of the Sahara. It had lived on in the sand, goodness knows how long, on the chance of some animal passing within the radius of a leap and so carrying it back to a congenial and not too rasorial a civilisation.” (Frank Frankfort Moore)
“Human fingers reshaped themselves into rasorial bird claws, skulls ballooned or stretched until they resembled butternut squash. Arms – like Da’s right one – grew as long as boa constrictors and then became paralysed. Flesh thickened into pachydermal hide or cloaked itself with monkey fur. Teeny blind eyes (some human and some not) burst through cheeks and palms and (just like Mary Shelley’s nightmare) the nipples of breasts. And, like what happened to Ma, and was passed on to me, pores gave birth to fish scales and gills.” (Tom de Haven)
“The town that barely is. That queen in wine.
Past and present violence in water.
The faint skip of a careless crane.
Poison chunks of bark that knock the eyes.
These facts I claim for my rasorial past
though I came here only yesterday from harm.”
(Richard Hugo)