Word of the Day: uxorious

uxorious (adj)

Excessively dependent on, attached to, or doting on one's wife.

"The queen asked her false husband whether it were possible to make her parrot talk, and he, in a moment of uxorious weakness, promised to make it speak. He laid his body aside, and sent his soul into the parrot. Immediately, the true king jumped out of his Brahmin body and resumed that which was legitimately his own, and then proceeded, with the queen, to wring the neck of the parrot."
--Sabine Baring Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves

Uxorious? I am married; let's not go there.

Instead, what's interesting to me about this strange passage is the whole notion of tricking one's bad self (evil doppelganger, you might say) into some neutral being or object (a parrot, in this case) and then killing it by destroying the object. Metaphorically, this is a form of catharsis. One splits off one aspect of one's personality into a work of art or, say, a blog. The rejected, repressed, or socially unacceptable part of oneself is "killed" by enclosing it in this container, where it can take on a life of its own, freeing the other aspects of the personality to go about their more mundane daily business. Or something. Once I had multiple personalities, but now we're feeling well....

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