Nimrod

[n] 1. (Old Testament) a famous hunter
2. Informal. A person regarded as silly, foolish, or stupid.

[After Nimrod. Sense 2, probably from the phrase “poor little Nimrod,” used by the cartoon character Bugs Bunny to mock the hapless hunter Elmer Fudd.]

An imgage came to her of herself and her mother, standing here in set positions, her mother by her rocker and she by the door; only they were tied together by a hank of green yarn, a cord that had grown frayed and weak from many restless tuggings. Image transformed into her mother in a nimrod's hat, the band sportily pierced with many different flies. Trying to reel it in for the last time and pop it away in the wicker creel. But for what purpose? To mount it? To eat it?

Stephen King, Salem's Lot.

"I'm afraid if your wife cannot give me her legal name," the man said, "this will have to be an involuntary commitment."

Your father stepped up to the man. "Listen to me, Nimrod," he said. "I'm paying the bill in this sonavabitch joint, and if my wife wants to sign herself in as the President of the Goddamn United States, that's how you'll do it, you hear me? Her name is Rita Abbott Hayworth. My wife signs in however she wants, and then you take Goddamn care of her. She is a precious woman. Am I clear?"

Man was clear.

Rebecca Wells, Ya-Ya Sisterhood

myrmidon

1. [n] (Greek mythology) a member of the warriors who followed Achilles on the expedition against Troy
2. [n] a follower who carries out orders without question

When the day came round for my return to the scene of the deed of violence, my terrors reached their height. Whether myrmidons of justice, specially sent down from London, would be lying in ambush behind the gate? Whether Miss Havisham, preferring to take personal vengeance for an outrage done to her house, might rise in those grave-clothes of hers, draw a pistol, and shoot me dead?

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

The Senor Don Alfonso stood confused. Antonia bustled round the ransacked room. And turning up her nose, with looks abused Her master and his myrmidons, of whom Not one, except the attorney, was amused. He, like Achates faithful to the tomb, So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause, Knowing they must be settled by the laws.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

bilious

v. (1) Of or pertaining to the bile; (2) Disordered in respect to the bile; troubled with an excess of bile; as, a bilious patient; dependent on, or characterized by, an excess of bile; as, bilious symptoms; (3) *Choleric; passionate; ill tempered. "A bilious old nabob." --Macaulay.

Australia's Parliament is divided into two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate (interesting, in a very low grade sort of way, that they use the British term for institution and the American terms for the chambers), and both of these were open for inspection from the visitors' galleries. Both were quite small, but handsomer than I had expected. On television, the green of the House of Representatives has a decidedly bilious look, as if the members are debating inside someone's pancreas...

--Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

Riley sat alone on the bench near the stenographer's office, the fabric of his expensive suit stretched tightly over his massive shoulders and meaty thighs. During the morning recesses, when Schlictmann gathered with Conway, Nesson, and Kiley in the corridoer, Riley would rise from his bench and stare balefully at Schlictmann from afar, his thin lips compressed and turned down in a look of bilious hatred.

--Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action

Theme: angry adjectives

Traduce

v. to lower or disgrace the reputation of; expose to shame or blame by utterance of falsehood or misrepresentation; to vilify; to slander.

While Russia was well, a foreignor could serve her and be a splendid minister; but so soon as she is in danger she needs one of her own kin. The sole result of traducing him as a traitor will be that later on, ashamed of their false accusations, they will suddenly turn him into a hero or a genius, which would be still more unfair to him. He's an honest and conscientious German....

--Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace

"Signor, said the squire, I have at length traduced my wife to consent that I shall attend your worship wheresoever you shall please to carry me." "Say reduced, and not traduced, Sancho," replied the knight.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

...an American individualist who refused to leave unexamined the orthodoxies of the customary and the established truth, an American individualist who did not always live in compliance with majority standards of decorum and taste, an American individualist par excellence was once again so savagely traduced by friends and neighbors that he lived estranged from them until his death, robbed of his moral authority by their moral stupidity.

Philip Roth, Human Stain

...verbs that hurt.

Sear

v. To char, scorch, or burn the surface of with or as if with a hot instrument.

There was also a smell: the same smell that would drift upriver, years later, to find me in my bed or in the field hockey goal. Like my own, similarly beaked nose at those times, my grandfather's nose went on alert. His nostrils flared. He inhaled. At first the smell was recognizable, part of the organic realm of bad eggs and manure. But after a few seconds the smell's chemical properties seared his nostrils, and he covered his nose with his handkerchief.

--Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

It was as though I rolled through a bed of hot coals. It seemed a whole century would pass before I would roll free, a century in which I was seared through the deepest levels of my body to the fearful breath within me and breath seared and heated to the point of explosion. It'll all be over in a flash.

--Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

....verbs that hurt.

Spurn

v. to reject with contempt; to scorn.

Malachy, at the far end of the bar, turned pale, gave the great breasted ones a sickly smile, offered them a drink. They resisted the smile and spurned the offer. Delia said, We don't know what class of a tribe you come from in the North of Ireland.

--Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes

Ted had already shown his workroom to his future models--Mrs. Mountsier and her daughter, Glorie. Effie had refused to leave the backseat of the car. Poor Effie was ahead of her time: She was a young woman of integrity and insight and intelligence, trapped in a body that most men either ignored or spurned; of the three women in the dark-green Saab on that Friday afternoon, Effie was the only one with the wisdom to see that Ted Cole was as deceitful as a damaged condom.

--John Irving, A Widow for a Year

Theme: verbs that hurt

Rube

n. (slang) - an unsophisticated country person; a yokel, a hick.

"We walked around with great big bread sticks sticking out of our pockets. They practically said, 'Hey, look at us, a couple of rubes from New Jersey.' We were probably just the kind of Americans they laugh at. But who cared? We walked around, nibbling at the tops of them, looking at everything, the Louvre, the garden of Tuileries--it was just wonderful...."

--Philip Roth, American Pastoral

The Whammer crowded the left side of the plate, gripping the heavy bat low on the neck, his hands jammed together and legs plunked evenly apart. He hadn't bothereed to take off his coat. His eye on Roy said it spied a left-handed monkey.

"Throw it, Rube, it won't get any lighter."

Though he stood about sixty feet away, he loomed up gigantic to Roy, with the wood held like a caveman's axe on his shoulder. His rocklike frame was motionless, his face impassive, unsmiling, dark.

--Bernard Malamud, The Natural