The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (7 page)

It was box-shaped with its front door dead center, four small windows near each corner, and constructed of the same red bricks as The Bell. A path made out of leftover bricks made a shallow S-shape between the gate and the front door.

Eventually he saw up through the long narrow air shaft that the stars had faded and the rhomboid of night sky had grown gray.

In home bathrooms, the toilet seats are complete ovals, while in corporate bathrooms the seats are horseshoe-shaped; I suppose the gap lessons the problem of low-energy drops of urine falling on the seat when some scofflaw thoughtlessly goes standing up without first lifting the seat.

Very clever were some of their productions—pasteboard guitars, antique lamps made of old-fashioned butter boats covered with silver paper, gorgeous robes of old cotton, glittering with tin spangles from a pickle factory, and armor covered with the same useful diamond-shaped bits left in sheets when the lids of tin preserve pots were cut out.

Make your locks as smooth as you like, and add a garland of those scarlet, star-shaped blossoms hanging from the bush behind you—crown yourself as you crowned old Cla-cla but the crazed look will remain just the same.

Now, running diagonally down her leg was a series of saucer-shaped welts, the center of each puffed and purple.

In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks and he could hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark where the rocks lay smooth and rectilinear as the stones of ancient ruins....

Building the hive, the workers have the look of embryonic cells organizing a developing tissue; from a distance they are like the viruses inside a cell, running off row after row of symmetrical polygons as though laying down crystals.

In one large painting he had put a bell-shaped mountain in the very foreground and covered it with meticulously painted trees, each of which stood out at right angles to the ground, where it grew exactly as the nap stands out on folded plush. MARILYNNE ROBINSON,
Housekeeping

Quite different from these nests of paper and clay are those of thickly felted vegetable hairs made by large wasps of the genus
Apoica.
Round or hexagonal in shape, five or six inches in diameter, these nests have the form of an umbrella without a handle or a stalkless mushroom.

It was in this place of astonishing miniatures that I came upon the lairs of the lions in the sunny sand—ant lions, that is. Small funnel-shaped pits dimpled the sand—inverted cones an inch or two in diameter across the top, tapering to the bottom perhaps an inch deep in the sand.

Probably the best known of the moths are the sphinx or hawk moths, some of which are so large they resemble hum mingbirds. The bodies of these moths are relatively stout and torpedo-shaped.

So, now, by opening the dam, he was able to fling an imposing girdle of water, a huge quadrilateral with the river as its base, completely around the plantation, like the moat encircling a medieval city.