Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
PREHENSILE
It is not uncommon for a technical or scientific word to break loose from its moorings and drift into the general language. Such has been the case with prehensile (pronounced pree-HEN-suhl or pree-HEN-sile), which started out merely meaning capable of prehension, gripping. One speaks, for example, of the prehensile tails of monkeys.
The word came over from French in the eighteenth century, deriving ultimately from the Latin prehendere, to grasp, seize, or catch. You will recognize the same root in apprehend and comprehend. That association leads to one of the figurative senses of prehensile: having developed mental ability to acquire and retain information. And there is also a negative figurative sense: grasping and avaricious.
It was not in the favorable figurative sense that H.L. Mencken wrote of the federal bureaucracy in Prejudices: "In countless other ways the members of the prehensile oligarchy help one another to violate the common rights of the plain citizen."
Example: Algis Valiunas, writing on Pauline Kael in Commentary, December 2011: "Kael became a supremely influential critic because of the daring, violent, steamy sorts of films she loved and the way she loved them: brashly, brazenly, like a teenage girl embracing her boyfriend with such prehensile abandon on a street corner that respectable passersby mutter, 'Get a room.' "