Entry: attritive (adj.)
In context: "Though C.T. makes his administrative assistant Lateral Alice Moore drive the prorectors bats trying to ferret out data on littler kids' psychic states, so he can forecast probable burnouts and attritive defection, so he'll know how many slots he and Admissions'll have to offer Incomings for the next terms."
Definition: Characterized by attrition, wearing away.
Other: A bit of neat info.
1927 W. S. Churchill World Crisis 1916–18 i. ii. 45 The only method of waging war on the Western Front was by wearing down the enemy by ‘killing Germans in a war of attrition’.
Attrition can also have a more theological emphasis, which is fascinating:
An imperfect sorrow for sin, as if a bruising which does not amount to utter crushing (contrition); ‘horror of sin through fear of punishment, without any loving sense, or taste of God's mercy’ (Hooker), while contrition has its motive in the love of God. (A sense invented by scholastic theologians in 12th c.; the earliest in English.)
SNOOT score: 2
Page: 99
Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Definitive Jest is a vocabulary-building and SNOOT-approved word-of-the-day blog centered around David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
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