accretion

in a sentence

She says if we laundered the term properly she'd put it on, but it's too covered with cultural accretions for comfort.†  (source) Joy Kogawa, Obasan, 1981

In our collective unconscious, by slow accretions of awareness, we grew proud that Bobby Bentley was taking everything they could dish out, everything imaginable.†  (source) Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline, 1980

Now this idea must be used by us to encourage once again the conception of a "historical Jesus" to be found by clearing away later "accretions and perversions" and then to be contrasted with the whole Christian tradition.†  (source) C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1942

The house shows its centuries of accretion: a jade tower on the east courtyard catching the first light of dawn, a series of gables on the south wing throwing triangles of shadow on the crystal conservatory at teatime, the balconies and maze of exterior stairways along the east porticoes playing Escher games with afternoon's shadows.†  (source) Dan Simmons, Hyperion, 1989

Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts.†  (source) Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

or because the generals of it never lived long enough to learn how to fight massed cautious accretionary battles, since they were already as obsolete as Richard or Roland or du Guesclin, who wore plumes and cloaks lined with scarlet at twenty-eight and thirty and thirty-two and captured warships with cavalry charges but no grain nor meat nor bullets, who would whip three separate armies in as many days and then tear down their own fences to cook meat robbed from their own smokehouses, who on one night and with a handful of men would gallantly set fire to and destroy a million dollar garrison of enemy supplies and on the next night be discovered by a neighbor in bed with his wife and be shot†  (source) William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 1936

They passed into a slightly more overgrown stretch of road, the kind that existed between two commercial areas and that gradually, by accretion, would be eliminated by another strip mall or auto parts store.†  (source) Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones, 2002

the vast yellow serpent of the river, alluvial with the mined accretions of the continent;†  (source) Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, 1929

In other words, was there some original master story for any particular myth from which all subsequent stories—pallid imitations—are "displacements," or does the myth take shape by slow accretion as variant story versions are told and retold over time?†  (source) Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, 2003

Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the accretions in which body and soul are enwrapped.†  (source) E. M. Forster, Howards End, 1910

"We both know the figure for storm accretion," Hawat said.†  (source) Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965

Isabel came at last to have a kind of undemonstrable pity for her; there seemed something so dreary in the condition of a person whose nature had, as it were, so little surface—offered so limited a face to the accretions of human contact.†  (source) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2, 1881

I was sure that mine about Everest was not mine alone; the highest point on earth, unattainable, foreign to all experience, was there for many boys and grown men to aspire toward, Thomas F Hornbein Everest: The West Ridge The actual particulars of the event are unclear, obscured by the accretion of myth.†  (source) Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air, 1997