Word: poshlust
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Body Stealer. There is some padding in the 13,390 entries. Is anyone likely to misplace humid or fervent or dawdle? Bernstein includes some delightful, half-remembered curios-a body stealer, for example, is a resurrectionist. But where is mooncalf? Where is poshlust? Sometimes the clue words are elusive. If one goes hunting for callipygian, he cannot look under "buttocks, rounded" or some such, but must hit "shapely buttocks" or "beautiful buttocks." ("Buttocks that are fat" yields steatopygia-which is a different matter altogether.) Bernstein's backward dictionary is a kind of combination thesaurus and crossword-puzzle dictionary...
...death, which for him possessed an erotic attraction. His first sexual experience seems to have occurred while he was gazing at a portrait of St. Sebastian, body pierced with arrows. Years later, with typically gorgeous effrontery, he posed for a photo in which he himself was St. Sebastian. Poshlust again. What rescued Mishima from merely exotic decadence was his creative vigor and intelligence. He found a larger context for his obsessions in the Japanese martial tradition, which formalized his bloody impulses and created in him a kind of reverence for heroic self-slaughter, the ultimate self-abuse. He lived...
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