The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations by David Grambs Read Free Book Online Page B

the Crown
     
     
    The rich benignant cigar smoke eddied coolly down his throat; he puffed it out again in rings which breasted the air bravely for a moment; blue, circular—I shall try and get a word alone with Elizabeth to-night, he thought—then began to wobble into hour-glass shapes and taper away; odd shapes they take, he thought.
    VIRGINIA WooLF, Mrs. Dalloway
     
     
    This miniature world demonstrated how everything was planned, people lived in these modern streamlined curvilinear buildings, each of them accommodating the population of a small town....
    E . L . DOCTOROW, World’s Fair
     
     
    A high lozenge of light told Medlar’s one cracked and sleep-blurred eye that dawn had come. That dim gray oval was the porthole in the cabin trunk, opposite.
    JOHN HEUSEY, Under the Eye of the Storm
     
     
    Directly across the way stood a top-heavy dockhouse, a weatherbeaten cube of pure nineteenth century raised up on out-curving supports for the purpose of enabling elderly ladies to sit out on good afternoons to watch the sailboats leaning at their work—a setting rendered completely other-day and unreal by this thick, moist air.
    JoHN HERSEY, Under the Eye of the Stor m
     
    wing-like
aliform
     
    X-shaped
decussate, chiasmal
     
    Y- or upsilon (Υ)-shaped
hypsiloid, ypsiliform, hypsiliform

Patterns and Edges
     
    I can hardly believe the Angels have a need for such scarves; anyway, the ones made by the Commander’s Wife are too elaborate. She doesn’t bother with the cross-and-star pattern used by many of the other Wives, it’s not a challenge. Fir trees march across the ends of her scarves, or eagles, or stiff humanoid figures, boy and girl, boy and girl. They aren’t scarves for grown men but for children.
    MARGARET ATWOOD, The Handmaid ’s Tale
     
     
Serena Joy, what a stupid name. It’s like something you’d put on your hair, in the other time, the time before, to straighten it. Serena Joy, it would say on the bottle, with a woman’s head in cut-paper silhouette on a pink oval background with scalloped gold edges.
    MARGARET ATWOOD, The Handmaid ’s Tale
     
     
With such exuberant invention, the identity of the animals represented can become very obscure. Usually there are precise clues. Two prominent teeth and a rectangular cross hatched tail among the maze of symbols indicate a beaver; a wide toothless mouth and no tail, a frog; a dorsal fin and a blow-hole, a killer whale.
    DAVID ATTENBOROUGH, The Tribal Eye
     
    having a pattern or design
patterned, designed, figured
    having a planned and orderly design
schematic
    having a varied pattern
variegated, motley, harlequin
    having a consistent or recurrent conceptual element
having a motif
    represented in a simplified or symbol-like form
formal
    represented in a realistic or somewhat detailed form
naturalistic
    having markings or images that don’t mean literally what they represent
(or that mean more than that)
symbolic, ideogramic, ideogrammic, ideogramatic,
ideogrammatic
    having markings or images that mean what they represent
pictographic, hieroglyphic, glyphic
     
    lengthwise
longitudinal, axial
    widthwise
horizontal, transverse
     
    having many dots
punctuate
     
     
Set on a basement of “rusticated” stonework of varying tones, its principal story is built of tan brick banded with strips of gaily-floriated tiles, which parallel the lines of the basement. Then, based on the module of the square flower tile, there rises an intricately corbelled cornice, a series of chimneys and a cylindrical tower, all of which are harmoniously interrelated by patterns such as chevrons and prisms.
    GEORCE R. CoLLINS, Antonio Gaudi
     
     
Bichrome wares accompany the prevalent monochrome pottery described above, but with the addition of white-painted motifs. The primarily geometric designs include bands, circles, dots, scrolls, frets, zigzags, triangles, diamonds, chevrons, and sunbursts, either singly or in combination, although some may represent