UD first encountered “tumescent” in a poem written by the sister of her high school boyfriend, and EKS used the word in its most common sense to mean an erect penis.
In this excerpt, Michael Tomasky, whose writing I admire, mixes things up a bit too much, offers too generous a helping of figurative language. He uses tumefied correctly, to mean narcissistically swelled up about one’s own greatness. But those of us familiar with this fancy adjective’s provenance are likely to venture toward swollen phallus territory.
Yet just after we start venturing, we’re hit with flaccid, a word, like tumescent, rarely employed non-phallically.
So is Donald Trump impressively tumescent/tumefied, or is he, like at least sixty percent of men his age, tumescent-challenged?
Ain’t none of my business; the point here is that Tomasky’s writing has me thinking about flaccid v. tumescent, and that’s not where he wants my thinking to go.