Entry: asphyxuated (adj.)
In context: "And you were totally shocked and traumatized. He was asphyxuated, irradiated, and/or burnt."
Definition: Orin, describing his father's death, pretty clearly means asphyxiated, but I like the little slip.
The etymology is kind of interesting: modern Latin, < Greek ἀσϕυξία , < ἀ priv. + σϕύξις pulse (whence also asphyxis has occas. been used).
This seems to suggest that asphyxia meant, at one point, death (or the moments immediately preceding death once the heart has stopped). The more colloquial meaning (The condition of suspended animation produced by a deficiency of oxygen in the blood; suffocation.) could as easily apply.
Other:
SNOOT score: 1
Page:250
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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