| 释义 |
cerement|ˈsɪəmənt|
Forms: 7 cerment, 9 cerement, cearment, searment.
[a. F. cirement ‘a waxing, a searing; a dressing, closing, covering, or mingling with wax’ (Cotgr.), f. cirer to wax: cf. also cere v. in sense 2, to wrap (a corpse) in a waxed cloth or shroud. Always concretely in Eng.: cf. covering, wrap, wrapping, shroud, and similar vbl. ns. (Sometimes erroneously pronounced ˈsɛrɪ- after ceremony.)]
Almost always in pl.: Waxed wrappings for the dead; loosely, grave-clothes generally. Rarely in sing. = cerecloth; winding-sheet, shroud. (App. caught up by modern writers from Shakespeare, and used in the same loose rhetorical way as urn, ashes, etc.)
1602Shakes. Ham. i. iv. 48 Tell Why thy Canoniz'd bones Hearsed in death, Haue burst their cerments. 1820Scott Ivanhoe xliii, The ghost of Athelstane himself would burst his bloody cerements. 1825― Talism. iv, Like a voice proceeding from the cearments of a corpse. a1845Hood Bridge Sighs 10 Look at her garments Clinging like cerements. 1836Mrs. Browning Poet's Vow, Nor wore the dead a stiller face Beneath the cerement's roll. 1856E. Capern Poems 144 In her cerements enfolded Pale and beautiful she slept.
attrib.1877A. B. Edwards Nile iv. 76 Shreds of cerement cloths.
b. fig. (Chiefly in reference to ‘bursting cerements’ or similar notions.)
1804W. Austin Lett. fr. London 87 Prior..the only one who burst the cearments of servitude and rose to eminence. 1821Byron Two Foscari iii. i. 81 Just men's groans Will burst all cerement, even a living grave's. 1879Farrar St. Paul I. 5 The man who loosed Christianity from the cerements of Judaism.
2. The action of ‘cering’ a dead body or its covering; the wax used. rare.
1868Stanley Westm. Abb. iii. 142 The renewal of the cerement ceased. (Cf. cerecloth 1, 1868.)
3. Waxy coating generally. rare.
1860All Y. Round No. 47. 493 The very lips seemed stiff with cerement, and the skins that were not hard red, were of a ghastly cosmeticised whiteness.
Hence cerement v., to wrap in cerements.
1858Sat. Rev. V. 308/1 Ceremented in inodorous fallacies. |