All 5 Uses of
limber
in
Moby Dick
- But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.†
Chpt 1-3limber = make flexible
- But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be.†
Chpt 1-3 *
- It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.†
Chpt 16-18
- And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.†
Chpt 55-57limbered = made flexible
- Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices.†
Chpt 88-90limber = make flexible
Definition:
of a person's body: flexible (capable of moving, bending, and stretching easily)
or:
readily adaptable -- especially of someone's mind
or:
readily adaptable -- especially of someone's mind