The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (2 page)

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Authors: David Grambs

BOOK: The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations

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Let me be quick to add that not all terms (or spellings) found in the quoted passages, borrowed from outside, as it were, will be found in the book’s word-listing text. The quotes are intended to illustrate uses of relevant terminology, but being from many writers and sometimes different periods are scarcely any kind of perfect fit with the selective lexicon that I’ve settled upon. Many writers create their own descriptives (or hyphenated descriptives), and often these will not be found in dictionaries—including this one. This—these quotations—is a good reminder to us that in prose writing, too, the whole is usually greater than the sum of its parts.

This book alone will not make you a first-rate descriptive writer or metaphor maker—you shouldn’t need to be told that. But it attempts to lay out the words you may want to choose from a bit more plainly than a thesaurus will; and, with its interspersed borrowed passages, it should help you in focusing on the delineational task at hand.

The Describer’s Dictionary
is of necessity selective in the areas that it covers. The describable contents of our terrestrial world and universe are incalculable and their possible descriptive attributes numberless. To attempt to catalogue all conceivable (and conceptual) terms that could be brought to bear on all the perceivable inanimate and animate phenomena of our planet, including all human artifacts, is a little too quixotic an order for a single, modest book.

The Describer’s Dictionary
does not include nautical terminology, medical descriptives, or the thousands and thousands of terms relating to furniture and clothing throughout human history. It does not presume to replace technical glossaries for countless fields of expertise, identify trees or automobiles or gems, or teach you names of animal body parts used by zoologists. But it does—and this is the guiding principle behind the book—present hundreds of solidly fundamental modifiers and designations, of shape, color, pattern, surface, and general aspect, that should make it easier for you to describe clearly just about any thing or any being palpable and visible. That is, although this work does not include such a term as
samovar,
it does include most of the words that you’d need for giving a reader or person not present a good description of one.

Some of the book’s terms are more technical than others, and some are quite rare. These Latinisms (as most of them are) notwithstanding,
The Describer’s Dictionary
is meant as a reference for the general reader—the average person, not the specialist. It simply happens that many of the more precise or holophrastic (denoting the most in the fewest words or letters) useful words in descriptive English are somewhat technical or unfamiliar. Architectural terms are one example, and Latinate adjectives for shapes or forms are another.

Technical terms have their place even outside of technical publications. Used judiciously, they can be informative to the general reader (introducing a new word) and enrich prose that otherwise uses familiar terminology.

I hope
The Describer’s Dictionary
will be a handy touch-stone for anybody having occasion to try to paint pictures with the English language.

ABOUT THE BOOK’S TERMINOLOGY

Many words in the various sections of the book should be familiar (if not always remembered or personally used). Other adjectives and nouns are more technical and probably quite unfamiliar.

It’s important to emphasize, first, that all the words and phrases are arrayed in these pages as
reminders,
or for possible use in description. Second, because a definitional phrase or common word is followed by a more arcane adjective is not to imply that the latter is preferable or more “correct.” In fact, it is more often the case that expert writers in particular fields, such as naturalists and art historians, use simple rather than technical language in their verbal depictions (as is shown in so many of the book’s accompanying illustrative passages).

Thus, the simple “wrinkled” can be just as apt as “rugose,” perhaps often more apt; and the existence of “hippocrepiform” notwithstanding, most writers, including academic specialists, will be far more likely to say simply “horseshoe-shaped.” It is always a question of context or audience—or wanting to use the occasional, optional syno
nym
for variety of expression.

The Describer’s Dictionary,
then, though it should bring to your attention many technical words that can be succinctly useful, is not to be misconstrued as a brief for favoring the bigger or ten-dollar word. Common or rare, the words are all part of our great English language. To paraphrase the famous remark of the mountain climber Mallory as to why one climbs a mountain, the words in the following pages are presented simply because they are there.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their considerate help with either the text or the illustrative quotations, I’d like to thank David Berne, David Black, Rich Collins, Bea Jacoby, Ellen Levine, Carl Rossi, and Mark W. Thompson. At W. W. Norton, I’m indebted to Starling Lawrence, Richard Halstead, Lucy Anderson, and Barbara Grenquist.

For her creative design suggestions, I’m especially grateful to Linda Corrente.

THINGS

Shapes

His white mantle was shaped with severe regularity, according to the rule of St. Bernard himself, being composed of what was then called burrel cloth, exactly fitted to the size of the wearer, and bearing on the left shoulder the octangular cross peculiar to the order, formed of red cloth.

SIR WALTER SCOTT.
Ivanhoe

The shapes of the letters are remarkably strong, written with expertise and confidence in symmetrical lines. Vertical strokes, both straight and rounded, are penned thickly with bold triangular pennant heads. Horizontal strokes are thin and are frequently used to join letters, sometimes with a slight triangular terminal.

PETER BROWN,
The Book of Kells

Some of the most austerely stylised figures of all are made by
the Dogon, a tribe living in Mali, in the Western Sudan.
Their sculptors reduce bodies to cylinders, arms to rods, eyes
to diamonds, breasts to cones. Yet their images often have a
brooding monumental presence that makes many a natural-
istic statue pale into vapidity.

DAVID ATTENB0R0UGH,
The Tribal Eye

having a shape or form
shaped, formed, configured, conformed, fashioned

having no shape, shapeless
unshaped, formless, amorphous, inchoate, unformed,
unfashioned

having a usually simple plane shape (lines or curves)
geometric

having the same shape or boundaries
coextensive

having
a similar form
conforming, similiform, equiform

having a different form
diversiform, variform

having many forms
multiform, multifarious, polymorphic, polymorphous,
multiplex, omniform, omnifarious

having a shape with equal sides and angles
regular

not having a shape with generally equal sides and angles
irregular

having an unconventional or uneven shape
irregular, contorted, misshapen, malformed, deformed,
twisted, grotesque

Mysticism always gripped the Welsh creative imagination, as we can see from the few Celtic artefacts still extant in the country. There is nothing straightforward to the manner of these objects, nothing right-angled or self-explanatory. They are neither realist in style nor entirely abstractionist—pictures which have evolved into patterns, triangles blurred into rhomboids, ritual combinations of curls and circles which may have some magic meaning, but have been stylized into an art form. When living creatures appear, they are caricature humans, schematic animals, and time and again there emerges the strange triskele, the wavy pattern of connected spirals which seems to have had some arcane fascination for the Celtic mind.

JAN MORRIS,
The Matter of Wales

Aulus recommended a mass-attack in diamond formation. The head of the diamond would consist of a single regiment in two waves, each wave eight men deep. Then would follow two regiments marching abreast, in the same formation as the leading one; then three regiments marching abreast. This would be the broadest part of the diamond and here the elephants would be disposed as a covering for each flank. Then would come two regiments, again, and then one. The cavalry and the rest of the infantry would be kept in reserve. Aulus explained that this diamond afforded a protection against charges from the flank; no attack could be made on the flank of the leading regiment without engaging the javelin-fire of the overlapping second line, nor on the second line without engaging the fire of the overlapping third.

ROBERT GRAVES,
Claudius the God

having an axially (or in relation to a central line) balanced shape
symmetrical

having an axially unbalanced shape
asymmetrical, dissymmetrical

more prominent or sizable on one side
one-sided, lop-sided

having the sides reversed (as in a mirror)
heterochiral

having proper or harmonious dimensions relationally
proportional, proportionate, commensurate, eurythmic

not having proper dimensions relationally
disproportional, disproportionate, uncommensurate

longer
in one dimension
elongated, oblong, oblongitudinal, lengthened, extended,
stretched, prolongated, elliptical, distended, protracted

shorter in one dimension
shortened, truncated, foreshortened

becoming wider
widening, expanding, broadening, dilating, splayed

becoming narrower
narrowing, tapering, tapered

having or coming to a point
pointed, pronged, spiked, acuate, acuminate, mucronate

having the form of a line or lines
linear, lineal, lineiform

straight and uncurved in line
rectilinear, rectilineal, linear, lineal

not straight
crooked, bent, askew, awry, oblique

We have just seen some of the geometrical properties of the Great Pyramid considered as a solid; it is of course not a tetrahedron, but has four lateral triangular faces sloping to a square base.

MATILIA GHYKA,
The Geometry of Art and Life

(... on a carved stone in the Naples Museum is engraved the “Sublime” Isosceles Triangle of the Pentagram, subdivided into the smaller similar triangle and its “gnomon,” et cetera); and he tried to explain the plans of Gothic churches and cathedrals (Beauvais, Cologne, Rheims, Notre-Dame, et cetera) by grafting directly onto the rectangular naves pentagons or pentagrams, the centres of which coincide with “focal” points like the centre of figure of the apse, or the altar. His star-diagrams are beautiful approximations (in some cases quite rigorous)....

MATILIA GHYKA,
The Geometry of Art and Life

A
Vexierbild
(puzzle-picture) by Schon, a Nuremberg engraver and pupil of Dürer, has been described by Rottinger: of large dimensions (0.44 metre × 0.75 metre) it is formed of four trapezoidal rows in which striped hatchings are continued by landscapes peopled with living figures. Towns and hills, men and animals are reabsorbed and engulfed in a tangle of lines, at first sight inexplicable. But by placing the eyes at the side and very close to the engraving one can see four superimposed heads inside rectilinear frames. Perspective causes the apparent images to disappear and at the same time the hidden outlines to appear.

JURGIS BALTRUSAITIS,
Anamorphic Art

represented in outline only
outlined, outlinear, contoured, delineatory, in profile,
silhouetted

having a sharp bend or angle
angular, geniculate, orthometric
(see hook-shaped)

standing at a right or 90° (L- orgamma-shaped) angle
upright, perpendicular, normal, orthogonal, rectangular,
orthometric

having a less than right angle
acute-angled

having three acute angles
triquetrous

having a greater than perpendicular angle
obtuse-angled