Entry: tumefies (v.)
In context: "Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Notkin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer or something, so that whenever he tumefies he'll suffer the same order of guilt that you less eccentrically tortured Ph.D.-type person will suffer at the idea of, say, wearing baby-seal fur."
Definition: Previously featured as tumescent (adj.): Becoming tumid, swelling; somewhat tumid; also fig.
Other: Included because the above context is just one of the many reasons I love Infinite Jest. And not because I share the above neurotic conviction. At all.
SNOOT score: 2
Page:220
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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