Quote:


Google returns 231 for arruginated, none of them definitions, all of them on e-texts of Ulysses.




well, it's not just a hapax in Ulysses anymore (oh accursed internet!):

Lovely word, discomfiture. Creates the very opposite of what it describes: a feeling of ease. Its mere appearance elevates the tone -- and god knows the tone here and there could stand some elevating.

Beautiful in itself, and also for what it so easily summons, such as "deconfiture" which, deprived of its privative, gives us "confiture," as in "confiture de fraises de bois" which might then lead us quickly from the banks of the Seine, by a commodius vicus, to the riverrun of the Liffey, where in a back room of a pub two doors down from the hazard that is just across from 7 Eccles Street, and where recently the postman found an arruginated key that looked as if it had been lying on the grass without complaint for 89 years, a jam session is in progress, and there are flourishes and licks of Jelly Roll Morton, and...