Sunday Word: Scabrous

[sallymn]

scabrous [skab-ruh-s]

adjective:
1 having a rough surface because of minute points or projections.
2 indecent or scandalous; risqué; obscene:
3 full of difficulties

Examples:

These letters - wry, scabrous and revealing - form the backbone of Wifedom. Funder embroiders around and through them to conjure the woman behind the pen - a kind of psychological ventriloquism, a 'counterfiction'. (Beejay Silcox, The mysterious absence of George Orwell’s first wife, The Sydney Morning Herald, July 2023)

That would be an unusually swear-filled, scabrous kindergarten class, naturally. (Martin Amis, Remembered by Writers, The New Yorker, May 2023)

In the early 1980s, a lot of London looked as scabrous as the power station; now it is the capital's last great ruin. (Rowan Moore, Why Battersea power station must be preserved, The Guardian, May 2012)

I spent much of my life guarding my heart. I guarded it so well that I could behave as though I didn't have one at all. Even now, it is a shabby, worm-eaten, and scabrous thing. But it is yours. (Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing)

He saw the fish-like scales, the scabrous whiteness of the slimy skin; saw the veined gills. (Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner, The Black Kiss)

It assumes a great variety of forms, which serve in many instances to characterize species; besides which peculiarities there are others to be noted, as the mode of its insertion into the pileus, its having or not having a ring, the circumstance of its being scabrous, glossy, or tomentose, reticulated, spotted, or striped, of one colour above and another below, or of its changing colour when bruised, any of which may sometimes assist our diagnosis. (Charles David Badham, A treatise on the esculent funguses of England)

And I tell you frankly, Monsieur Hanaud, that the name of the widow Chicholle is scabrous. She is of the bad quarters of this town. (A E W Mason, The Prisoner in the Opal)

Origin:

1570s, 'harsh, unmusical' (implied in scabrously), from Late Latin scabrosus 'rough,' from Latin scaber 'rough, scaly,' related to scabere 'to scratch, scrape' (from PIE (s)kep- 'to cut, scrape, hack'). The sense in English evolved to 'vulgar' (by 1881), 'squalid' (by 1939), and 'nasty, repulsive' (by 1951). The etmological sense of 'rough, rugged, having little sharp points' is attested in English from 1650s. (Online Etymology Dictionary)