All Comments on 'Sexual Coaching Ch. 03'

Your stories have a sexy, exotic atmosphere. Very hot.

deliquescent cunt = nice assonance, but odd given the chemical & botanical definitions.....deliquescent cunt sounds erotic, lubricious, but .....

This from World Wide Words: Many people first encountered this word, as I did, during a school

science lesson in which some crystals were put out on the bench.

Within a few minutes they absorbed enough water vapour from the air

to dissolve into solution. Such crystals are said to deliquesce or

to be deliquescent.

That's a specific technical application of a word whose meanings in

English are intriguing. How about "dusty and deliquescent"? In the

nineteenth century, "deliquescent" was used jokingly of someone who

has become so hot through physical exertion that he's swimming in

sweat. "Dusty and deliquescent" became what we may politely call a

set phrase or, impolitely, a cliché:

The country pedestrians, "dusty and deliquescent" with

their long rounds, are seen marching back towards the

city.

[The Little World of London, by Charles Manby Smith,

1857.]

The Latin original is "deliquescere". This could mean "dissolve",

but more negatively it implied melting away or exhausting. Romans

might employ it figuratively for dissipating one's energies. This

produced another English meaning - of organic matter such as fungi

that decomposes into a liquid mass after fruiting. Such ideas gave

this author a way to create an image of fading fruitfulness:

There was a middle-aged woman at the far side of the

room with black dyed hair and a sort of deliquescent

distinction.

[Room at the Top, by John Braine, 1957.]

The word can - surprisingly - describe a plant stem that repeatedly

branches. The concept is of a single stem that ramifies by repeated

branchings into ever smaller stems until it fades to nothing. This

deeply figurative example is presumably borrowing the idea:

This past fall, with the consecutive openings of six

"Asian biennials," the deliquescent 1990s and early-2000s

trend toward establishing new large-scale exhibitions in

increasingly far-flung locales bore fruit, such as it

is.

[Artforum, 1 Jan. 2009]