With the new snow flattening sounds he felt almost deaf or dreaming. His boots crumped down into it. Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze, 2009
The horses' hooves crunched in the snow, the wagon wheels creaked through it and, behind, the march of several hundred feet crump-crumped along. Janet Paisley, White Rose Rebel, 2007
“We’ve had the process referred to as byzantine, shrouded in secrecy, opaque. Yet this is the process that Congress designed, a process that not only demands confidentiality, but strict confidentiality. This is the system we’re tasked to administer,” Grundmann said. Joe Davidson, "Hill's workplace rights agency points to Congress for lack of transparency," Washington Post, December 1, 2017
Over the course of two hundred pages I had improvised a byzantine system involving highlighter, underlines, and marginal punctuation marks. Tom Perrotta, Joe College, 2000
“The only safe thing is to take a chance,” she told Nichols, who was both amazed at her moxie and inspired by her trust in him. , "Sweet and Sour," The New Yorker, June 13, 2005
He's not a natural singer ... but like the kid in the school play who sells the thing by sheer force of moxie, Crowe handily wins us over. Richard Lawson, "'Les Miserables': Destroying Cynicism with Song," The Atlantic, December 17, 2012
Would that our sins had built-in qualities of oblivescence such as our dreams have. Iris Murdoch, A Word Child, 1975
Even in reasoning, the gratifying confirmatory instance sticks in the mind, while the negative cases all go glimmering into oblivescence. H. L. Hollingworth, "The Oblivescence of the Disagreeable," The Journal of Philosophy Psychology and Scientific Methods, Volume VII, January–December 1910
Debates over epistemic principles sound abstract, but they have enormous practical repercussions. For instance, in order to decide policy matters (like what to put in our textbooks and what to teach in science classrooms) we need to decide on the facts. Michael Lynch, "Defending Science: An Exchange," New York Times, March 11, 2012
The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening. David Roberts, "America is facing an epistemic crisis," Vox, November 2, 2017
As you approach the formal entrance from State Street on the west, you're looking at five or six stories ... of ornately carved and fenestrated red sandstone. Sarah Andrews, Fault Line, 2002
Even those who feel queasy at the sight of such ostentatious perpetrations of Sir Gilbert Scott in his Gothic Revival style, may yet feel its presence visually preferable to yet another skyscraping multiplication of a single fenestrated module. Patrick Ryan, "The last word on ... Diplomatic dilapidation," New Scientist, January 16, 1975
At such a moment, the arrival of her friend was a sincere pleasure to Elizabeth, though in the course of their meetings she must sometimes think the pleasure dearly bought, when she saw Mr. Darcy exposed to all the parading and obsequious civility of her husband. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813
He was garrulous and obsequious, sprinkling “yes, sir”s around as though casting handfuls of seed on new-raked soil. Annie Proulx, "A Resolute Man," The New Yorker, March 21, 2016