casuistry [kazh-oo-uh-stree]

noun:
1 specious, deceptive, or oversubtle reasoning, especially in questions of morality; fallacious or dishonest application of general principles; sophistry
2 the determination of right and wrong in questions of conduct or conscience by analyzing cases that illustrate general ethical rules

Examples:

At each of the 2,430 games played this past season, official scorers, nestled in the press boxes, have devoted considerable intellectual energy and an elaborate casuistry to working out which plays are errors and which aren't. The statistic’s sublime pointlessness is pure baseball. (Stephen Marche, The Error in Baseball and the Moral Dimension to American Life, The New Yorker, October 2017)

Casuistry may be defined as adroit rationalization, but what it suggests to most people is a degenerate ability, ordinarily attributed to lawyers, to justify anything or to defend any conceivable act or point of view. (Richard A Shweder, Storytelling among the Anthropologists, The New York Times, September 1986)

Hubert Lepel was wonderfully well versed, in subtle turns of argument - in casuistry of the abstruser kind. It was long since he had looked truth full in the face or drawn a sharp boundary-line between right and wrong. (Adeline Sergeant, A Life Sentence)

And the paradoxes in which Raffles revelled, and the frivolous casuistry which was nevertheless half sincere, and which his mere personality rendered wholly plausible at the moment of utterance, appealed very little to me when recalled in cold blood. (E W Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman)

Brown demonstrates that Donne employed an explicitly Protestant form of casuistry wherein the individual was responsible for making moral choices, based on conscience, reasons, and scripture. (Meg Lota Brown, 'Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England', Journal of Church and State, September 1997)

Origin:

1703, in ethics, 'the solution of special problems of conscience by application of general principles or theories,' see casuist (from French casuiste (17c) or Spanish casuista) + -ry. Even in the earliest printed uses the sense was pejorative. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

chthonian [thoh-nee-uhn]

adjective:
(classical mythology) of or relating to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth; of or relating to the underworld

Examples:

This terrestrial approach is almost alchemical and emphasized by the exhibition's title hermetic aspect: 'Sonde d'arc-en-taupe' mentions two complementary patterns, mole tunnels and rainbows, a way of linking the cosmos and the chthonian world, the stars and the underground. (Jean-Marie Appriou, Palais de Tokyo, February 2022)

So if The Dunwich Horror ends up happening and manages to be successful, I’ll bet a canvas bag full of chthonian artifacts that the third film will be The Shadow over Innsmouth. (Tom Reimann, Hollywood Has a Lovecraft Problem, Collider, February 2020)

This chthonian belief - that the world’s underbelly rumbles with life - guides all the so-called Earth-based faiths. (Michael Tortorello, If a Druid Rings the Doorbell, The New York Times, October 2013)

Our trains are not ambushed by dragons, suicide bombers, or chthonian tentacle monsters. Frankly, given the quality of the postprandial conversation, this is not a net positive. (Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum)

The chthonian deities form a counterpart to the dwellers on Olympus. (John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets)

It must be strange to die, surrounded by jackals at their chthonian litanies. (Martin Swayne, In Mesopotamia)

Origin:

'of or pertaining to the under world,' 1882, with -ic + Latinized form of Greek khthonios 'of the earth, in the earth,' from khthōn 'the earth, solid surface of the earth' (mostly poetic), from PIE root dhghem- 'earth.' (Online Etymology Dictionary)

cerement [seer-muhnt, ser-uh-]

noun:
1 the cloth or clothing in which the dead are wrapped for burial or other form of funeral
2 any graveclothes

Examples:

'She admitted that she had not seen it herself; but her daughter had and seen it so plainly that she was able to describe the cerements of the grave in which it was attired.' Cerements were the waxed cloth used for wrapping a corpse before burial, suggesting the ghost looked very much like a storybook ghost, clad in pale material. (Michael Billington, Weird Norfolk: The ghost of Ber Street in Norwich, Eastern Daily Press, January 2022)

Had not the singer of Wimpole Street said that they were binding up their hearts away from breaking with a cerement of the grave? (Jess Hardiman, Murder mystery book that has only been solved 4 times in almost 100 years, UNILAD, January 2023)

Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form. (Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Masque of the Red Death')

It was a long bundle, as long as a man, and was swathed in cerements of white Egyptian tissue. ''Tis you! 'tis you!' I sneezed rapturously, recognising the object of our search, the very mummy which, two thousand years ago, Theodolitê had prepared with her own fair but cruel hands. (Andrew Lang, He)

There was another darkness about her, thicker than the mere night, like a black cerement dropping over her soul. (Joseph Hergesheimer, Wild Oranges)

Origin:

First recorded in 1595–1605; cere, Medieval Latin cēra literally, wax + -ment, French from Latin -mentum, suffix forming nouns, usually from verbs (Dictionary.com)

The earliest known use of the noun cerement is in the early 1600s. OED's earliest evidence for cerement is from 1604, in the writing of William Shakespeare, playwright and poet. (Oxford English Dictionary)