Richly hirsute 2

[neil]

on 24/1/05 4:49 pm, Arnold M. Zwicky at zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Richly hirsute
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> On Jan 24, 2005, at 2:36 AM, neil quoted:
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>> "Now," she murmured, sliding her hand down his back to his hirsute ass.
>> She pulled at the firm, muscles of his rear, feeling the coarse,
>> affluent hair stiffen under her smooth palms.
>>
>> -Alex Ayers, 'The Soldier's Wife', Greenleaf Classics, San Diego, 1969
>
> one annoying characteristic of malapropisms is that they tend to block
> the reader's (or hearer's) attempts at retrieving the right word in the
> context -- the word the writer (or speaker) *should have used*.
>
> "abundant"?
>
> by the way, was there really a comma between "firm" and "muscles"?

'Fraid so - but then the text has presumably been OCRd, which may account
for the unlikely comma (? dirt on the page). The story was found at
http://www.asstr.org/files/Collections/libertine/novels

I believe affluent can also mean flowing, but perhaps not in the sense of
these locks.
>
> arnold, marveling at the conflict in tone between "hirsute" and "ass"