hearsomeness
English
Etymology
From Middle English hersumnesse, from Old English hīersumnes (“obedience, submission, service, humility”), equivalent to hearsome + -ness.
Noun
hearsomeness (uncountable)
- (nonce word) Obedience; submission to authority.
- 1939, James Joyce, Finnegans Wake:
- Thus the hearsomeness of the burger felicitates the whole of the polis.
- 1993, John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark:
- […] his awakened "hearsomeness" causing him to misconstrue the sound, along Aristotelean lines, as the sound of thunder.
- 1996, Christine Froula, Modernism's body:
- The cultural "bonum" that arrives by her Grace, issuing from the "malo" (apple/evil) of this "foenix culprit," consists in her streaming urine/words, which the Jarl's felicitous "hearsomeness" — his passion to keep her within his hearing and heir-ing […]
-
Related terms
- hearsome