qqotd: pica, doula, maverick, dreck

...plus: cineast, portend, additament

Yesterday we saw a cineast's brain eating pasta made from film stock; the pica on display today is of a doula who compulsively eats any undiscarded dreck she can find in the home of the baby she has just helped deliver, usually to the relief of the parents who tend to dread the rare instance when she doesn't have this compulsion because that portends that the baby will grow up to be a stubborn and powerful maverick who will seek to alter the town's consensual architectural decisions by demanding additaments designed to represent the cognitive dissonance in the townfolks' cherished norms and morés.

Cross-posted: QuadrivialQuandary.com

qqotd: pica, portend, cineast, additament

"For a cineast," he famously said, "films, even some bad ones, are cerebral and spiritual sustenance," which is what inspired the starving brain's ravenous devouring of the film stock pasta, an odd pica if seen literally but it doesn't imply the brain's descent into madness any more than the seemingly incongruous additament of a large HDTV to the optic nerve portends a diminution of intellectual heft.

Cross-posted: QuadrivialQuandary.com

qqotd: sacerdotal, Sapphic, pied-à-terre, flagitious

It was the Catholic Church's mishandling and cover-ups of the scandals that he felt was the most flagitious of the sordid goings on, and it soured his sacerdotal aspirations, leaving him bereft of his sole source of solace after he learned that his wife had been exploring her Sapphic desires at their beach-side pied-à-terre without ever offering to let him watch.

Cross-posted: QuadrivialQuandary.com

qqotd: savoir-faire, piffle, leviathan, gallimaufry (plus a few earlier ones)

When QQ is a linguistic leviathan with sole authority to regulate and police sesquipedalianism, it will ensure that no public square, real or virtual, is without a gallimaufry of long words in every language and a rich macédoine of examples of their usage in groups of four; but, despite its awesome power and the ubiquity of its myrmidons, there will be piffling subversives among its ranks who will weaken the prevailing esprit de corps with claptrap disguised as charm and savoir-faire.

Cross-posted: QuadrivialQuandary.com

qqotd: chef-d'oeuvre, flaneur, winnow, roborant

Another pointless morning, countless days into the media fuss over his one and only chef-d'oeuvre, he spotted two roborant words in the Classifieds that rescued him from the morass of notoriety: "Flaneurs Wanted," the ad read, "Explore the landscapes of your choice, physical or otherwise, at your pace, on your terms, with our implanted, patent-pending Human Condition Aggregator (HCA) that will winnow from your experiences (and those of other networked testers) the beta version of the Human Condition Genome (TM)."

Cross-posted: QuadrivialQuandary.com

qqotd: amour-propre, hebetude, disputatious, couture

Using the latest couture, he mixed and matched popular designers to create au courant, sartorially iconoclastic attires that had a disputatious effect at fashion events, thus replenishing his amour-propre with a vindicating superiority over the hebetude of the unimaginative designers who were far more influential than he.

Cross-posted: QuadrivialQuandary.com

qqotd: scienter, languish, imbroglio, malleable

This mind, this macédoine of passionate fancies, fickle enthusiasms and perverse proclivities, is ultimately a listless imbroglio languishing in the confines of corporeal possibilities, accused of renouncing scienter its storied ability to keep reality malleable in the face of all manner of relentless adversity.

Cross-posted: QuadrivialQuandary.com

qqotd: videlicet, shill, temerarious, Brobdingnagian

Knowing that the farmers had been indentured for generations, he picked the most temerarious youths in the village, trained them in the Universal Capitalist Arts, videlicet price gouging, predatory lending, bait and switch, etc., and sent them off to the powerful and ruthless money-lenders to shill for his plans for building a Brobdingnagian shopping mall on the villagers' farms.

Cross-posted from QuadrivialQuandary.com.

qqotd: cap-a-pie, claptrap, macédoine, martinet

Amidst the macédoine of antique furniture and objets d'art, he stood uandorned, wearing cap-a-pie the adoring gaze of his mistress, which the martinet she was playing couldn't belie; so, when she pointed the whip at him and said, "I don't want to hear any mushy, romantic claptrap from you," he could tell she was finding it difficult to stay in character and he knew that the magic between them was gone.

[qqotd = QuadrivialQuandary of the day]

qqotd: doggo, gestalt, pedantic, benison

When challenged, his characteristically pedantic response was that sitting doggo (except for pressing buttons on the remote) and staring at TV shows, his only benison, just about summed up the gestalt of his existence.

Cross-posted from: QuadrivialQuandary.com

qqotd: nettle, leaven, mollycoddle, affable

She seemed at her affable best, greeting every insufferable guest with charm and poise, as if she had decided to mollycoddle their fragile egos, which she later told me was precisely the case, and that every time one of them nettled her with their self-importance, it only leavened her distaste for the milieu she had married into and fortified her resolve to escape from it.

Cross-posted from QuadrivialQuandary.com.

qqotd: nettle, plicate, pittance, germane

In the picture he sat on an exquisite yet unassuming chair that he had designed, against the backdrop of sheer, plicate curtains through which you could see the lake outside the window, all of which nettled me because he had made for himself a much nicer home than my suburban McMansion, despite earning a pittance compared to my seven-figure income and never ever considering success to be germane to his life.


Cross-posted from QuadrivialQuandary.

qqotd: nettle, Jezebel, galvanize, billingsgate

The Jezebel married the quantum physicist for his beautiful mind and bragged about him to nettle her many paramours enough to galvanize their alpha-male instincts, which made them try to outdo his genius with the intensity of their lovemaking, but her deceit paled in comparison to her husband's who was taping the poetic billingsgate she tended to spew in conversation and publishing it as his own in the prestigious Journal of Slumming Geniuses.

Cross-posted from QuadrivialQuandary.com.

qqotd: expiate, buttress, littoral, exegesis

Put a couple of drinks in him and any mention of writing will launch him into an exegesis of his last novel set in a small, coastal town where watching the littoral erosion seems to be the favorite pastime and the inhabitants zealously prosecute tourists caught using pot, as if to expiate their own epidemic of meth addiction and buttress their respectability among neighboring communities.


[qqotd = QuadrivialQuandary Of The Day]