Word: unction
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...shoes, winding knobs, leaning-all pointed at her like some mad animal . . . like a gun. All through a blue funk from glowing cigarettes. the faces are dark and there is a menacing murmuring. She had descended into the pit and her words rush out in a whisper of extreme unction...
These last two are of Lipton's own making--he insists the classifying shouldn't have ended in 1486. In a final and separate section of the book, he does his own inventing: a complex of psychoanalysts, a failing of students, an unction of undertakers (a larger group: an extreme unction), a rise of mini-skirts. He even outlines production rules: onomatopoeia, habitat, comment, etc. Always, the first term must pinpoint a feeling we have about the group being described. For instance, Lipton rules out calling prostitutes an anthology of pros, because the humor lies in the second term--anthology...
...collective nouns (a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a skulk of foxes, a labor of moles), most of which began in the 1400s in England as precise terms of venery. Happily, the collection has continued to grow during the intervening centuries: a shrivel of critics, an unction of undertakers (which, in larger groups, becomes an extreme unction of undertakers), and a swish of hairdressers. Etymology has seldom been pursued with more charm, literacy...
...floor by Bill Barry. A guard attempted to keep both a priest and Ethel away from the emergency room, flashed a badge, which Ethel knocked from his hand. The guard struck at her; Tuck and Fred Dutton swept him aside. Then the priest was allowed to administer extreme unction...
...this too un-Christian, too uncharitable a response to events? One cannot, I suppose, begrudge the powerful their characteristic unction in these circumstances. Indeed, it may remind us again of how different he was from them...