the Word for Thursday

ANFRACTUOSITY




A channel, crevice or passage full of windings and turnings.



Not quite describing a maze, though some mazes certainly take on an anfractuous appearance, one that is sinuous or winding. The noun is rare enough that it is hard to find examples, the adjective almost equally so.


One sense is of a broken or jumbled landscape. T S Eliot used this in his poem Sweeny Erect: “Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks / Faced by the snarled and yelping seas”. Another comes from the nineteenth-century interest in phrenology, reading character by the shape of the head, supposedly reflecting that of the brain beneath; the anfractuosities in this case were the convolutions of the surface of the brain.


A rare modern sighting is in A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. Here it refers to a certain kind of opaque and circuitous legal prose, seemingly designed more to confuse than to clarify. Its authors quote this splendid example of literary legal convolution from New York in 1858:


Unless the code, by abolishing the distinction between actions at law and suits in equity, and the forms of such actions and suits, and of pleadings theretofore existing, intended to initiate, and has initiated new principles of law, by which a class of rights and of wrongs, not before the proper subjects of judicial investigation and remedy, can now be judicially investigated and remedied, the facts stated in the plaintiff’s complaint in this action, do not constitute a cause of action, and the demurrer of the defendant to that complaint is well taken.


The word comes from Latin anfractus, a bending around, from the verb frangere, to break. So it is a close cousin of the much more recent fractal, as well as fracture, fragile, refraction, and, rather less obviously, infringe and osprey (the latter ultimately derives from ossifraga, bone breaker, originally applied to the lammergeier).


example: Please be more specific. Your verbal meanderings are at best anfractuous, you obtuse miniscule australopithecine.. LOL