His legacy includes an adjective, "Ruthian," meaning prodigious.
They're great in some new, proto-postmodern meaning of great: gorgeous and gross, prodigious and puerile, enchanting and insulting, plagiarizing and original, often all at the same time.
But Laura remains spiritually connected to Voss's great enterprise, which is not only to traverse a prodigious interior but to enrich its impoverished spaces with its first European myth, to invest it with European meaning.
They sat outside in the warm darkness for hours, drinking rum and fruit juice washed down with beer, eating prodigious amounts of food, eyeballing the beautiful Cuban-American girls and explaining, in words that often give new meaning to the term "offensive line," how they have accomplished all they have.
Willes's objects of contempt included portentous, antiques, despicable, obsequious, homicide, destructive and prodigious, all of which he labelled "ink-horn terms" - a word itself now vanished from common usage, meaning an inkwell made out of horn.
"She did an absolutely prodigious amount of work," said her admiring thesis adviser, Prof. Jack Rakove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution," who taught a course on Thomas Jefferson that Ms. Clinton took last year.
The function and meaning of mandalas and other such objects can be fully explained only by an interpretive calculus of prodigious complexity, one untimately accessible only to initiates.
Language acquisition is a prodigious feat that requires abstracting rules for the use of sounds, words, grammar, and appropriate ways to convey desired meaning in a variety of social contexts.
Prodigious activities beckoned.
His philanthropy was prodigious.
