The agreeable eye

an eudæmonist

glithery, an anthology

“Deary me, Miss Kate, don’t ye talk so, don’t ye now! You make me feel that glithery! Dear heart, I thought I saw a man’s face peep out o’ yonder pricket!”

“Nonsense; there is no one,” said Kate.

—Mary A.M. Hoppus Marks (Five-Chimney Farm, vol. 2, p. 58, ca. 1877)

When I think of […] those men turning away shamefaced when mother and daughter cried over each other, it makes me hot all over. Do you know, when I slipped off one of them got in my way and shook hands. He said nothing. That would have spoilt it. But I saw the confounded gas-lamps all glithery for a minute.

—Arthur Paterson (Crusaders, p. 50, ca. 1925)

Oiled silk…. Of course—that was what her fingers had touched in the dark, slipping from the clasp to its cold glitheriness. No wonder she had thought about snakes. Nothing except a snake could feel so like one as oiled silk.

—Patrica Wentworth (Weekend with Death, 7%, ca. 1941)

Disappointed, I crossed the river, and took the first path to the right: a Sinhalese sign-post helped not at all, but Ceylon Rest Houses have the entirely commendable idea of hanging up the local one-inch map-sheet. A motorable road has replaced that path since my last visit, but for me it was “een seer slycherige en glibberige Wegh” in [Fryke] Schweitzer’s delightful phrase which so well suggests “slithery and glithery”.

—Rowland Raven-Hart (Ceylon: History in Stone, p. 123, ca. 1964)

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