abhuman

[Victor Steinbok]

... Which, of course, is just an expansion of "A. B. Something".

     VS-)

On 2/13/2011 2:28 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> At 2/13/2011 01:59 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>> Not in OED but scores of GB hits:
>>
>>
>> 1997 _Australasian Victorian Studies Journal_ III 47 [GB: not verified in
>> print]: [Kelly Hurley's] organising principle for her investigations of
>> these texts is "the abhuman," a term she borrows from the horror writer
>> William Hope Hodgson to denote the possibilities of "the ruination of
>> traditional constructs of human identity."
>>
>> 2000 Michelle A. Masse' in David Punter, ed. _A Companion to the Gothic_
>> (Oxford: Blackwell) 240: By foregrounding the loss of all boundaries, or
>> dissolution into the abhuman, Hurley addresses issues of race and
>> masculinity in the Gothic that evidence themselves as 'hysterical nausea.'
>>
>> It sort of means "no longer fully, significantly, or recognizably human."
> Or perhaps more monstrous, as in Abby Normal?
>
> Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org