The word "preternatural" is a correct and usable word in written English.
It means something that is beyond what is considered natural or normal. For example, you might say, "He had a preternatural aura about him that made me feel uneasy."
Ray, being a newcomer, is quick to spot the preternatural peace ("This place could do with a bit of livening up").
Despite what one might have thought was a growing amount of evidence to the contrary, the prime minister's preternatural confidence in his own powers of persuasion is undiminished.
Mr Blair's political afterlife resembles those of former British leaders less than it does that of Mr Clinton, which it echoes in a number of ways the power couple, the grandiosity (notepaper headed "Office of Tony Blair"), the preternatural energy combined with an air of self-conscious dash.The company that Mr Blair keeps does not endear him to many of his compatriots, either.
But he will need preternatural skills to achieve a victory against Mr Hollande.
Some talk of him as future presidential material.Mr Crist, a breezy charmer with pearly teeth and a preternatural tan, remains popular as governor.
But if the French found Mr Sarkozy's self-promoting hyperactivity stressful, they now find Mr Hollande's preternatural calm unnerving.
He has admitted to "grave mistakes", but said he did not commit them knowingly.His powers of survival seem preternatural.
The result is a delightful and hilarious memoir about the characters she loved as a prim girl with an overactive imagination (the hair of "The Little Mermaid" "curls like the waves she lives in") and the ones she has come to admire as an independent thirty-something (Jane Eyre's preternatural calm "now seems like enviable self-possession").
The Chanson de Roland indulges freely in the fantastic and the unreal: hence Charlemagne's patriarchal age and preternatural strength (he is more than 200 years old when he conquers Spain); or the colossal numbers of those slain by the French; or, again, the monstrous races of men following the Saracen banners.
Not that any marvel or preternatural happening taking place in secular (as opposed to biblical) history was necessarily to be believed: it was simply that the remote times and regions were convenient locations for picturesque and marvellous incidents.
While they were under the god's inspiration, the bacchantes were believed to possess occult powers and the ability to charm snakes and suckle animals, as well as preternatural strength that enabled them to tear living victims to pieces before indulging in a ritual feast (ōmophagia).
