Tuesday, July 28, 2015

The Word -Dolorous

Kolton banged his head against the door. "Let me out." He called out hoarsely. Hours had passed by. HOURS and these fools had not once even jiggled the handle to release him. He'd issued threats, rewards, pleas, to no avail. They'd mocked him, taunted him in return. His stomach growled in a dolorous manner. He didn't know the last time he'd eaten. There was no food here. No water. It was like he was a prisoner! He was a prisoner. What did these fools want with him?! He didn't even know how they'd managed to get him out of his home! Where had his guards been, where had the servants been? He hoped they'd all been killed trying to defend him. Anything less and they would wish that they had died when he got back. He sank to the floor, his hand brushing the lunette blade in its sheathe. Why make him prisoner, but leave him with a weapon? Fools.

Dolorous - causing, marked by, or expressing misery or grief.

Added Info - "No medicine may prevail ... till the same dolorous tooth be ... plucked up by the roots." When "dolorous" first appeared around 1400, it was linked to physical pain--and appropriately so, since the word is a descendant of the Latin word dolor, meaning "pain" as well as "grief." (Today, "dolor" is also an English word meaning "sorrow.") When the British surgeon John Banister wrote the above quotation in 1578, "dolorous" could mean either "causing pain" or "distressful, sorrowful." "The death of the earl [was] dolorous to all Englishmen," the English historian Edward Hall had written a few decades earlier. The "causing pain" sense of dolorous" coexisted with the sorrowful" sense for centuries before slipping from use in the 19th century.

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