"Mike breathed a little sterterously." This is a sentence in the P. G. Wodehouse novel, Spring Fever. Practically everyone in a Wodehouse book, it seems, breathes sterterously at one time or another, at least the males characters. It appears to have been a qualifying quality. (For the uninformed, "sterterous" means "noisy or labored." Today we might say "sucking air.")
"Sterterous" is not to be confused with "stentorian," another very useful word beginning with "s" found abundantly in the works of Sir Pelham. After the Wodehousean figure calmed down from his sterterousness, his voice frequently became "stentorian" ("loud and powerful").
No comments:
Post a Comment