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You know who will send you to your dictionary every five minutes? Edith Wharton. In the first few pages of The Custom of the Country, she refers to “the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen” and to the “grotesque saurian head” of the same. Animal adjectives are popular with fiction writers, who need lots of them, and with political columnists, who need only a few of them, mainly asinine, mustelid, and ovine. Wharton, probably under the influence of William James’s Principles of Psychology, sometimes takes a kind of physiognomic approach to characterization.

-Kevin D. Williamson