The word of the day is roach:
Downstairs, on a bracket shelf next to a vase with hand-painted pink roses on it, there is a matching picture of him, taken at the same time. His hair is roached and he is wearing a high stiff collar, and hardly anything shows in his face but his Welsh ancestry.It’s an American verb. The Oxford English Dictionary explains:
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980).
1803: “To clip or trim (a horse’s mane) close to the neck so the hair stands on end; to give (a horse) a roach mane.” The verb derives from a nautical noun: “an upward curve cut in to the foot of a square sail," and later, “a curved or convex part of a fore-and-aft sail extending beyond a straight line between any two of its three corners, especially on the leech side.”
By 1833 the verb applied to human hairstyling: “To brush or cut (hair) in a roach.”
By 1872, there was a noun: “A hairstyle in which the hair is brushed so as to stand up or sweep back from the face; a roll or wave of hair.”
The OED citations include a great sentence from Langston Hughes (1950): “Her head was all done fresh and shining with a hair-rocker roached up high in front.”
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Other word-of-the-day posts (Pinboard)
comments: 2
Ernie Pyle also used the word in describing a GI he had met. As best I recall, he mentioned that the guy was handsome, with black hair that roached back... In _Brave Men,_ I believe.
Thanks for that, Elaine. So now we have Hughes, Maxwell, Pyle. The OED also has a Faulkner sentence. It feels like this word is everywhere.
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