The best way to understand what an ouroboros is is to do a Google image search. (But whatever you do, don't "google" it!) Here's a link to one example http://www.esoterica.gr/articles/sciences/quantic/ouroboros.jpg. I was just being cheeky because the idea that the word "verbal" would serve to illustrate a linguistic concept seemed...autophagous as it were.



I thought of another good connotation/denotation pair. "Evil" and "wicked" seem pretty close, but in normal everyday speech here in the U.S. we'd use the latter more to describe someone whose activities violated social mores (e.g. sexual mores), for example "a wicked woman." But someone who is truly dangerous or harmful would be more aptly described as evil.