Word of the Day: quinate

quinate (adj)

Arranged or appearing in groups of five.

"She removed her spike-heeled shoe, revealing her one deformity: her toes were not quinate. Indeed, she had six toes on her left foot, immaculately pedicured, and with each nail painted a different color, so that the effect was like a six-hued rainbow. She caught me staring at this polydactyl anomaly. 'Just a little more of me to love,' she said."
--Leahcim Setag, Strange Loops

Marilyn Monroe was rumored to have six toes on one foot, but this is a myth. She definitely had "something extra", but it wasn't a toe.

Polydactylism (having one or more extra fingers or toes) apparently occurs fairly frequently in cats (more than in humans anyway), and Ernest Hemingway, among his many other quirks, loved six-toed felines. According to Wikipedia, "Upon Hemingway's death in 1961, his former home in Key West, Florida, became a museum and a home for his cats, and it currently houses approximately fifty descendants of his cats (about half of which are polydactyl)."

Often I wish I had extra fingers when I'm typing. Those Z and Q keys are a stretch. Don't get me started on "qwerty"....

(Quinate, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)

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Random: "All my friends are dead" and it's hilarious. (Thanks, Bill.)
My hero: David Lynch by Paul Murray