Sunday Word: Fuliginous

[sallymn]

fuliginous [fyoo-lij-uh-nuhs]

adjective:
1 sooty, smoky
2 obscure, murky
3 of the colour of soot, as dark grey, dull brown, black, etc

Examples:

Statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon, although an early advocate of the scientific approach, reiterated the long-held belief that it was 'an excellent spirit to repress the fuliginous vapour of dusky melancholie'. (Ian Morton, Borage: The Pimm's decoration that powered the Crusaders and lifted 'dusky melancholie', Country LifeJune 2021)

'As the dawn breaks, over roof slates, hope hung on every washing line..." he sings, his life again sounding like a sepia-toned kitchen sink drama set in some fuliginous terrace suspended somewhere in the 1950s. (Jeremy Allen, Richard Hawley, Truelove's Gutter, The Quietus, September 2009)

I doubt if the entire statute book could be successfully searched for a sentence of equal length which is of more fuliginous obscurity. (Tay & Partners , Trademarks Act 2019 - Part 2, November 2019)

Now let me drop another circle on the diagram, and scribble in the tiny patch where it intersects with the other two circles, and label it in the deepest fuliginous black: here be monsters. (Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum)

Origin:

The diarist John Evelyn wrote in 1661 about the dreadful smoke from coal fires in London that was so bad that 'Her Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour... corrupting the Lungs, and disordering the entire habit of their bodies, so that Catharrs, Phthisicks1, Coughs and Consumptions rage more in this one City than in the whole Earth besides.'

Fuliginous usually means sooty but it can also refer to a sooty or dusky colour ('the whole body is of a rather light fuliginous or brownish grey', which is in a description of the bird called Bonaparte's shearwater) or to some noxious vapour said in old medical texts to be formed by combustion within the body and which affected the head in particular ('It is not amiss to bore the skull with an instrument to let out the fuliginous vapours' - The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton.)

The word is from Latin fuligo, soot, which has also been used in English with the same meaning. Fuligo ligni is the Latin for wood soot, a form of charcoal; it was once listed in the British Pharmacopoeia as an antispasmodic, for instance to help with the treatment of whooping cough. (World Wide Words).

Fuliginous is a word with a dark and dirty past - it derives from fuligo, the Latin word for 'soot'. In an early sense (now obsolete), 'fuliginous' was used to describe noxious bodily vapors once thought to be produced by organic processes. The 'sooty' sense, which English speakers have been using since the early 1620s, can be used to describe everything from dense fogs and malevolent clouds to overworked chimney sweeps. Fuliginous can also be used to refer to something dark or dusky, as in Henry James' novel The Ambassadors, in which the character Waymarsh is described as having 'dark fuliginous eyes'. (Merriam-Webster)

Sunday Word: Fuliginous

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

fuliginous [fyoo-lij-uh-nuhs]

adjective:
1 sooty, smoky
2 obscure, murky
3 of the colour of soot, as dark grey, dull brown, black, etc

Examples:

Statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon, although an early advocate of the scientific approach, reiterated the long-held belief that it was 'an excellent spirit to repress the fuliginous vapour of dusky melancholie'. (Ian Morton, Borage: The Pimm's decoration that powered the Crusaders and lifted 'dusky melancholie', Country LifeJune 2021)

'As the dawn breaks, over roof slates, hope hung on every washing line..." he sings, his life again sounding like a sepia-toned kitchen sink drama set in some fuliginous terrace suspended somewhere in the 1950s. (Jeremy Allen, Richard Hawley, Truelove's Gutter, The Quietus, September 2009)

I doubt if the entire statute book could be successfully searched for a sentence of equal length which is of more fuliginous obscurity. (Tay & Partners , Trademarks Act 2019 - Part 2, November 2019)

Now let me drop another circle on the diagram, and scribble in the tiny patch where it intersects with the other two circles, and label it in the deepest fuliginous black: here be monsters. (Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum)

Origin:

The diarist John Evelyn wrote in 1661 about the dreadful smoke from coal fires in London that was so bad that 'Her Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour... corrupting the Lungs, and disordering the entire habit of their bodies, so that Catharrs, Phthisicks1, Coughs and Consumptions rage more in this one City than in the whole Earth besides.'

Fuliginous usually means sooty but it can also refer to a sooty or dusky colour ('the whole body is of a rather light fuliginous or brownish grey', which is in a description of the bird called Bonaparte's shearwater) or to some noxious vapour said in old medical texts to be formed by combustion within the body and which affected the head in particular ('It is not amiss to bore the skull with an instrument to let out the fuliginous vapours' - The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton.)

The word is from Latin fuligo, soot, which has also been used in English with the same meaning. Fuligo ligni is the Latin for wood soot, a form of charcoal; it was once listed in the British Pharmacopoeia as an antispasmodic, for instance to help with the treatment of whooping cough. (World Wide Words).

Fuliginous is a word with a dark and dirty past - it derives from fuligo, the Latin word for 'soot'. In an early sense (now obsolete), 'fuliginous' was used to describe noxious bodily vapors once thought to be produced by organic processes. The 'sooty' sense, which English speakers have been using since the early 1620s, can be used to describe everything from dense fogs and malevolent clouds to overworked chimney sweeps. Fuliginous can also be used to refer to something dark or dusky, as in Henry James' novel The Ambassadors, in which the character Waymarsh is described as having 'dark fuliginous eyes'. (Merriam-Webster)