rigor mortis

plural rigor mortises · alternative misspelling rigour mortis

1. uncountableusuallyTemporary stiffness of the body's muscles and joints following death.

   Such are the principal phenomena observed during that form of contraction which I conceive to be analogous to the rigor mortis...

   1840, Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, page 491

   4 more examples

   Then we carried in poor Austin from the yard. His muscles were set as hard as a board in the most exaggerated rigor mortis, while the contraction of the fibres had drawn his mouth into a hard sardonic grin.

   1913, Arthur Conan Doyle, “(please specify the page)”, in The Poison Belt […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

   […]an unpublished writer who, for all his ambition and flashes of talent, had not been trained in the rigours (nor rigor mortises, for that matter) of a university education.

   1991, Bruce Bennett, Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry, Oxford University Press, page 56

   Its wood can neither be carved nor used for the making of the furniture because of the volatility of those characteristics of the nutrients it has sucked which come from innumerable varieties of rigor mortises.

   2009, A.S.Q., The Anatomy of Grief, AuthorHouse, page 109

   Instead, Tender Buttons destabilizes persistent syntactic arrangements and lexical rigor mortises to assert that “certainly glittering is handsome and convincing,” glittering a radiant process of flux and variance.

   2010, Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, Graywolf Press, pages 66–67

   Synonyms: death-stiffness, rigor

present singular third person rigor mortises · participle present rigor mortising · participle past rigor mortised · past rigor mortised · alternative misspelling rigour mortis

1. To stiffen the muscles and joints with, or as if with, rigor mortis.

   Fingers were rigor mortised to triggers.

   1996, A. A. Gill, Sap Rising, Black Swan, Transworld Publishers, published 1997, page 131

   5 more examples

   As Olive was in the kitchen making some tea I asked what kind of louse the host was. “The kind you like to see laying out on a mortuary slab rigor mortising before the introduction.”

   1964, Israel Segal, Out of the Womb, Times Press, page 177

   Hands / Responding to bold brain waves, / Hiding feelings, / Twiddling facts, / Dating destinies, / Doting on things, / Withering in death traps, / Snapping brittle, / Folding stiffly / When movement ceases / And rigor mortises the joints.

   1972, James R. McCready, The Seasons Calling: Haiku & Western-Style Verse, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., →ISBN

   Let the old woman point until her finger rigor mortises and she has to bandage it in the daytime and pretend it got caught between the rocks, grinding corn into meal.

   2000, Stephen Graham Jones, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Fiction Collective Two, →ISBN, page 99

   Forget rigor mortising, clutter of taxidermy.

   2009, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, Persea Books, page 189

   At McCray’s, we had to lift Pa off Flash in the folded position he had rigor mortised to.

   2017, Albert Bennetti, In a Buffalo Robe, Archway Publishing, Simon & Schuster, →ISBN