Saturday, July 11, 2015

word of the day: gallooning

context:
The house faced the sea from a low bluff of dunes beside a red-brick lighthouse with a fourteen-mile, two-second light. Down the coast green lawns met the beach with a thin gray strip of boardwalk in between, like gallooning. All the way down, where on the clearest days the horizon came ashore, the rocks of an inlet led into Barnegat Bay.

definition (The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t offer this particular form “gallooning;” however a definition appears under “galloon”): A kind of narrow, close-woven ribbon or braid, of gold, silver, or silk thread, used for trimming articles of apparel; a trimming of this material.

source: The Family of Max Desire a novel by Robert Ferro
1983. E. P. Dutton, New York

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