The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (7 page)

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Authors: David Grambs

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IAN MC EWAN,
The Child in Time

It was box-shaped with its front door dead center, four small windows near each corner, and constructed of the same red bricks as The Bell. A path made out of leftover bricks made a shallow S-shape between the gate and the front door.

IAN MC EWAN
, The Child in Time

Eventually he saw up through the long narrow air shaft that the stars had faded and the rhomboid of night sky had grown gray.

E. L. DOCTOROW,
Ragtime

While he was using the lavatory, he began making his Evelyn Waugh face, then abandoned it in favour of one more savage than any he normally used. Gripping his tongue between his teeth, he made his cheeks expand into little hemispherical balloons; he forced his upper lip downwards into an idiotic pout; he protruded his chin like the blade of a shovel.

KINGSLEY AMIS,
Lucky Jim

Now, why was diagonal cutting better than cutting straight across? Because the corner of a triangularly cut slice gave you an ideal first bite. In the case of rectangular toast, you had to angle the shape into your mouth, as you angle a big dresser through a hall doorway: you had to catch one corner of your mouth with one corner of the toast and then carefully
turn
the toast, drawing the mouth open with it so that its other edge could clear; only then did you chomp down. Also, with a diagonal slice, most of the tapered bite was situated right up near the front of your mouth, where you wanted it to be as you began to chew....

NICHOLSON BAKER,
The Mezzanine

pad-like or pillow-shaped
pulviliform, pulvillar

paddle- or oar-shaped
remiform

palm-shaped
palmate, palmiform, palmatiform

papyrus-shaped
papyriform

pea-shaped
pisiform

pear-shaped
pyriform

pear (upside-down)-shaped
obpyriform

pebble-shaped
calciform, calculiform

pencil-shaped
penciliform

petal-shaped
petalifonn

phallus-shaped
phalliform

pie-shaped
sectoral

pie-shaped with a flat end rather than a point
segmental

pincer- or claw-shaped
cheliform

pipe- or tube-shaped
tubifonn, fistuliform

pitcher-shaped
ascidiform

plant-shaped
phytoform

In home bathrooms, the toilet seats are complete ovals, while in corporate bathrooms the seats are horseshoe-shaped; I suppose the gap lessons the problem of low-energy drops of urine falling on the seat when some scofflaw thoughtlessly goes standing up without first lifting the seat.

NICHOLSON BAKER,
The Mezzanine

Very clever were some of their productions—pasteboard guitars, antique lamps made of old-fashioned butter boats covered with silver paper, gorgeous robes of old cotton, glittering with tin spangles from a pickle factory, and armor covered with the same useful diamond-shaped bits left in sheets when the lids of tin preserve pots were cut out.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT,
Little Women

Make your locks as smooth as you like, and add a garland of those scarlet, star-shaped blossoms hanging from the bush behind you—crown yourself as you crowned old Cla-cla but the crazed look will remain just the same.

W. H. HUDSON,
Green Mansions

pod-shaped
leguminose,leguminifonn

pouch-shaped
saccifonn, scrotiform, bursiform

prickle-shaped
aculeiform

prop-like
fulciform

pruning-knife-shaped
cultrate, cultriform

pulley-shaped
trochleiform

purse-shaped
bursiforin

radial in form
actiniform

ram‘s-head-shaped
arietinous

reed-like
calamiform

rice-grain-like
riziform

ring-shaped (or spirally curled)
circinate, cingular, annular

rod-like
virgulate, bacillary, bacilliform, vergiform, baculiform

roof-shaped
tectiform

rope- or cord-like
funiform

rows-of-bricks-like
muriform

Now, running diagonally down her leg was a series of saucer-shaped welts, the center of each puffed and purple.

MICHAEL Crichton,
Sphere

In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks and he could hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark where the rocks lay smooth and rectilinear as the stones of ancient ruins....

CORMAC MC CARTHY,
All the Pretty Horses

Building the hive, the workers have the look of embryonic cells organizing a developing tissue; from a distance they are like the viruses inside a cell, running off row after row of symmetrical polygons as though laying down crystals.

LEWIS THOMAS,
The Lives of a Cell

In one large painting he had put a bell-shaped mountain in the very foreground and covered it with meticulously painted trees, each of which stood out at right angles to the ground, where it grew exactly as the nap stands out on folded plush. MARILYNNE ROBINSON,
Housekeeping

Now whether it was physically impossible, with half a dozen hands all thrust into the napkin at a time—but that some one chestnut, of more life and rotundity than the rest, must be put in motion—it so fell out, however, that one was actually sent rolling off the table; and as Phutatorius sat straddling under—it fell perpendicularly into that particular aperture of Phutatorius’s breeches, for which, to the shame and indelicacy of our language be it spoke, there is no chaste word throughout all Johnson’s dictionary....

LAURENCE STERNE,
Tristram Shandy

S-shaped
sigmoid, annodated

saddle-shaped
selliform

sandal-shaped
sandaliform

saucer-shaped
pateriform, acetabuliform

sausage-shaped
allantoid, botuliform

scimitar-shaped
acinaciform

scissors-shaped
forcifonn

shallow-depression-shaped
glenoid

shark-shaped
squaliform, selachian

shell-shaped
conchiform, conchate

shield-shaped
scutiform, scutatiform, aspidate, elytrifonn, peltate, clypeate,
clypeiform, peltiform

shovel- or spade (implement)-shaped
palaceous

sickle-shaped
meniscal meniscate, meniscoid, menisciform, lunate, falcate,
drepaniform, drepanoid, bicorn

sieve-like
cribriform, cribrose, cribral, cribrate, coliform

sling- or loop-shaped
fundiform

slipper-shaped
calceiform, soleiform

Quite different from these nests of paper and clay are those of thickly felted vegetable hairs made by large wasps of the genus
Apoica.
Round or hexagonal in shape, five or six inches in diameter, these nests have the form of an umbrella without a handle or a stalkless mushroom.

ALEXANDER F. SKUTCH,
A Naturalist in Costa Rica

It was in this place of astonishing miniatures that I came upon the lairs of the lions in the sunny sand—ant lions, that is. Small funnel-shaped pits dimpled the sand—inverted cones an inch or two in diameter across the top, tapering to the bottom perhaps an inch deep in the sand.

VIRGINIA S. EIFERT,
Journeys in Green Places

Probably the best known of the moths are the sphinx or hawk moths, some of which are so large they resemble hum mingbirds. The bodies of these moths are relatively stout and torpedo-shaped.

DAVID F. COSTELLO,
The Prairie World

snail-shell-shaped
cochleate, cochleiform, soleiform

snake-shaped
colubriform, anguiform

spade (implement)- or shovel-shaped
palaceous

spade (cards)- or inverted-heart-shaped
obcordate, obcordiform

spatula-shaped
spatulate

spear-shaped or arrowhead-shaped (with flaring barbs)
hastate

sphere-shaped
spherical, spheriform

spike-shaped
spiciform, spicate

spindle-shaped
fusiform

spine- or thorn-shaped
aculeiform, spiniform

spinning-top-shaped
strombuliform

spoon-shaped
cochleariform, spatulate

spread-fingers-like
digitate

stake-shaped
sudiform

stalk-like
stipiform

star-shaped
astroid, actinoid, stellate, stellar, stelliform

star-shaped (small star)
stellular

So, now, by opening the dam, he was able to fling an imposing girdle of water, a huge quadrilateral with the river as its base, completely around the plantation, like the moat encircling a medieval city.

CARL STEPHENSON, “Leiningen Versus the Ants”

The crust of the Great Basin has broken into blocks. The blocks are not, except for simplicity’s sake, analogous to dominoes. They are irregular in shape. They more truly suggest stretch marks. Which they are.

JOHN MC PHEE,
Basin and Range

Salt has a low specific gravity and is very plastic. Pile eight thousand feet of sediment on it and it starts to move. Slowly, blobularly, it collects itself and moves. It shoves apart layers of rock. It mounds upon itself, and, breaking its way upward, rises in mushroom shape—salt dome. Still rising into more shales and sandstones, it bends them into graceful arches and then bursts through them like a bullet shooting upward through a splintering floor. The shape becomes a reverse teardrop.

JOHN MC PHEE ,
Basi
n
and Range

In the pool of light shed onto her lap, an exquisitely manicured hand guides a slender gold-plated propelling pencil across the lines of print, occasionally pausing to underline a sentence or make a marginal note. The long, spear-shaped finger-nails on the hand are lacquered with terracotta varnish. The hand itself, long and white and slender, looks almost weighed down with three antique rings in which are set ruby, sapphire, and emerald stones.

DAVID LODGE,
Small World

stem-like
cauliform

stirrup-shaped
stapediform

stone-like (small stone)
lapilliform

strap-shaped
ligulate, lorate

string-of beads-like
moniliform, monilioid

sword-shaped
gladiate, ensate, ensiform, xiphoid, xiphiiform

tail-like
caudiform

teardrop-shaped
guttiform, lachrymiform, stilliform

tendril-like
pampiniform

tent-shaped
tentiform

thorn- or spine-shaped
aculeiform, spiniform