All 5 Uses
impotent
in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(Edited)
- At night they would wrestle for several hours in an anguished violence that seemed to be a substitute for the act of love, until popular intuition got a whiff of something irregular and the rumor spread that Ursula was still a virgin a year after her marriage because her husband was impotent.
Chpt 2 *impotent = unable to have an erection for sexual intercourse
- His eyes grew moist with indignation, with angry impotence, and for the first time since his defeat it pained him not to have the strength of youth so that he could begin a bloody war that would wipe out the last vestiges of the Conservative regime.
Chpt 11impotence = lack of power to change things
- As had happened with the death of his wife, as had happened to him so many times during the war with the deaths of his best friends, he did not have a feeling of sorrow but a blind and directionless rage, a broad feeling of impotence.
Chpt 12
- She saw with quiet impotence how the deluge was pitilessly exterminating a fortune that at one time was considered the largest and most solid in Macondo, and of which nothing remained but pestilence.
Chpt 16 *
- He treated the classical writers with a household familiarity, as if they had all been his roommates at some period, and he knew many things that should not have been known, such as the fact that Saint Augustine wore a wool jacket under his habit that he did not take off for fourteen years and that Arnaldo of Villanova, the necromancer, was impotent since childhood because of a scorpion bite.
Chpt 20impotent = unable to have an erection for sexual intercourse
Definitions:
-
(1)
(impotent as in: impotent fury) lacking power or ability
-
(2)
(impotent as in: impotent, so no children) of a male: unable to have an erection for sexual intercourse, or unable to conceive a child
- (3) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)