Marius Hancu quotes Cormac McCarthy:
>> They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs
>> and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back
>> upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and
>> stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some
>> old storm...
Horace LaBadie explains:
> A kerf is the cut made by a saw. It is the width of the teeth of the
> saw. Thus, a sharp, narrow cut in the rock, as though made by a giant
> saw.
But note the word "upthrust" in the original, which doesn't go with a
cut or notch. I might guess that the meaning is that the particolored
stone forms an outcrop with straight sides, as if they had been cut by
a saw -- except that *that* doesn't go with the word "ragged".
I am left wondering if McCarthy actually knows what a kerf is, or if he's
just hoping the reader won't know.
--
Mark Brader "'You wanted it to WORK? That costs EXTRA!'
Toronto is probably the second-place security hole
m...@vex.net after simple carelessness." -- John Woods
My text in this article is in the public domain.