Word of the Day: distichous

distichous (adj)

Divided into two parts or two rows.

"His eyes? Nor pen nor camera can present them. Imagine a black pearl imprisoning a diamond; imagine a dewdrop trembling on polished jet; add to these beauties life, and you will have the dormouse eye. His tail? Distichous, say the books. Feathers are mostly distichous, hair-partings are distichous, the moustache is distichous. So is the dormouse tail; but the hairs along it do more than merely part. They curl, upwards from the root, downwards to the point, and form a plume."
--Douglas English, Wee Tim'rous Beasties

Do you remember what the dormouse said? (It wasn't "feed your head".) In Alice in Wonderland, he said, among a few other things, "You might just as well say that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!" He also told a story about three sisters who lived at the bottom of a treacle well and were learning to draw anything that began with the letter M. This confused Alice, of course, who took everything literally, with comic effect. It's still one of my favorite books.

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