N

NACREOUS :  adj  having to do with nacre, mother-of-pearl

. . . her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.

--Nabokov, Lolita, p. 167.

She dreams often of the same journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by that same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window.

--Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 471.

NAIAD :  noun  an aquatic nymph. Compare ARTEMID, DRYAD, OREAD, MAELID

. . . the record--Le Sacre du Printemps--caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads† and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame.

--Boyle, Budding Prospects, p. 4.

NATES :  noun  buttocks. Compare HURDIES, PRAT

. . . the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs.

--Nabokov, Lolita, p. 44.

NEAPNESS :  noun  the tidal condition of being at the lowest high-water level

All I sense is the current neapness! If Bellerophon might rebegin, unclogged, unsilted! Time and tide, however, et cetera.

--Barth, Chimera, p. 145.

NEB :  noun  nib, tip, bill. See PELLICULE

NECTAREOUSLY :  adv  excessively sweetly

Watching a nectareously obsequious or cretinously eye-rolling announcer on the television, the patrons were not regaled. . . .

--Exley, A Fan's Notes, p. 266.

NEMORAL :  adj  grove-dwelling

Its archaic handsomeness, nemoral and chthonic,† is the palustral† involution of the vagina folded out and distended, cave become tower. . . .

--Davenport, "The Dawn in Erewhon," Tatlin!, p. 155.

NEPOPHILE :  noun  lover of a nephew or niece

. . . my rival Phineus, who lusted after Andromeda . . . avuncular nepophile.

--Barth, Chimera, p. 65.

NEROTIC :  adj  characteristic of the Roman Emperor Nero; hence, sexually psychotic. Compare CALIGULAR

I had nothing at all to do but spin indolent daydreams of absolute authority--Nerotic, Caligular authority of the sort that summons up officefuls of undergraduate girls, hot and submissive--leering professorial dreams

--Barth, The End of the Road, p. 89.

NESCIENCE :  noun  ignorance, of the cosmic, universal sort. Compare IGNAVIA, NIHILISCIENT

I have two really huge sturgeon--giants--brought live, in immense vats, now swimming in blissful nescience of their impending ah quietus.

--Burgess, Napoleon Symphony, p. 221.

At last with a groan she turned and tore away this veil of nescience, and made her yawning way to the lavatory. . . .

--Durrell, Constance, p. 280.

NESH :  adj  soft, delicate, prissy. Compare FERBLET, MEACOCK

. . . he saw nesh intellectuals and heard them giggling and bleating. That sort of café then.

--Burgess, Napoleon Symphony, p. 230.

NICTITATION :  noun  winking

. . . [a] blundering Cadillac half entered my driveway before retreating in a flurry of luminous nictitation.

--Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 160.

NIHILISCIENT :  noun  ignorance, of the cosmic, universal sort. Compare IGNAVIA, NESCIENCE

". . . . your supreme omnipotent nihiliscient majesty--"
"That word, what was that word?"
"A neologism. Nichtswissend. Nothingknowing."

--Burgess, Napoleon Symphony, p. 237.

NINNYHAMMER :  noun  a simple fool. See LOOBY

NOCTIVAGANT :  adj  night-wandering. Compare DIVAGATE

. . . noctivagant beigns shackled to earth. . . .

--Gardner, Jason and Medeia, p. 58.

Unhappily, we lst the big fellow, Smirke, to noctivagant predators some days back. . . .

--Boyle, Water Music, p. 363.

NONSEQUITUR :  verb  (from noun) to say something that does not follow logically a previous statement

". . . I am fed up with women taking over."
"What does that have to do with removing the Painted Bird?"
"Everything."
"Do you want to tell me more? Feel free to talk."
"Beebody has been good to me," the gard hat nonsequitured.

--Eastlake, Dancers in the Scalphouse, p. 108.

NOUGHT, NAUGHT :  noun  1) nothing; 2) see quotation

"Nought," I said, "your honor. An Elizabethan term meaning mistress or lover. Actually, nought being represented as a cicrle, it signifies the organ of ingress. It was in very common use."

--Burgess, Earthly Powers, p. 490.

Snout:    . . . he is a very paramour for a sweet voice.
Flute:    You must say "paragon"; a paramour is, God bless us, a thing of naught.

--Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, IV, ii, 11-14.

NOX :  noun  night. See PATIBULARY

NUCHAL :  adj  having to do with the nape of the neck

A nuchal kiss, daddled foreskin, tongue and whisper into an ear together.

--Davenport, "On Some Lines of Virgil,"
Eclogues, p. 233.

NUMEN :  noun  "divine power, deity" (Fowles). NUMINOUS, adj

"Never mind what it is. Look at it. Look into its eyes."
He was right. The little sunlit thing had some numen; or not so much divinity, as a having known divinity, in it; of being ultimately certain.

--Fowles, The Magus, p. 147.

Religion is increasingly confirmed as satisfying a numinous passion in all of us. . . .

--Burgess, The End of the World News, p. 211.

Voluminous is next to numinous. Air has no memory, not of us, at least, any more than a deity needs a potato peeler.

--West, Out of My Depths, p. 119.

. . . all those earlier Slothrops packing Bibles around the blue hilltops as part of their gear, memorizing chapter and verse the structures of Arks, Temples, Visionary Thrones-- all the materials and dimensions. Data behind which always, nearer or farther, was the numinous certainty of God.

--Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, pp.241-242.

NUPSON :  noun  a fool, an idiot. Compare BOANTHROP, DODDIPOL, JOBBERNOWL

"What a nupson you can be, John Martin!"

--Davenport, "John Charles Tapner,"
Da Vinci's Bicycle, p. 50.

NUSUS :  noun  See quotation

"What," he gasped, "are the grounds?"
She smiled sweetly . . . "The Muslims have a useful short word--nusus. It means the unwillingness of one of the marital partners to cohabit with the other."

--Burgess, The End of the World News, p. 114.

NUTATIONAL :  adj  nodding. Compare DAVVEN

. . . Saturn's rings to whirl, moons their precessions, our own Earth its nutational wobble. . . .

--Pynchon, V., p. 239.