Word: resurrectionist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
This macabre little song chilled many bones in Edinburgh when the "resurrectionists," i.e., men who stole fresh bodies for surgical research, flourished a century or so ago. A true resurrectionist, who dealt in live bodies while practicing a trade in mercy on the bloody landscape of the Europe of the 19403, is a man named Joel Brand. He told his story to a German journalist, Alex Weissberg, who put it down baldly and brutally. Fine writing would be an offense against the appalling facts of this bitter memoir...
| 1 |