Monday, April 01, 2013

Word of the Day: ingurgitate

What's "the word I'm thinking of"? Today, it's....

ingurgitate (verb)

To gulp or swallow greedily

"But what purpose does this wealth serve? Do they use it as a means for benefiting society? Is it employed as a sword with which to defend the weak? Is it an architect that builds? Is it a seed-sower that distributes? Or, is this quality merely the capacity to take in--to ingurgitate, ingurgitate, ingurgitate?"
--Henry Ward Beecher, "Remnants," in The Original Plymouth Pulpit (1871)

We have a bird feeder hanging from the apple tree in our back yard. The free food has attracted flocks of small, ravenous birds (chickadees and sparrows, I think), as well as the occasional red cardinal and blue jay. They fight over the seeds, and ingurgitate so fast that they end up dropping a lot of them onto the ground, where fat squirrels scarf them up. It's quite a pig-out session, until the neighbor's cat strolls through the yard; then they all scatter until she leaves. I wish I had a video camera and could capture these wildlife vignettes. To me, it's far more entertaining and edifying than anything on Animal Planet.

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