struldbrug

plural struldbrugs

1. Alternative letter-case form of Struldbrug.

   1 more example

   Popular science and even academic conferences discuss the possibilities of human beings living for hundreds of years or longer, but some of us remember the terrible fate of Jonathan Swift’s immortal struldbrugs on the island of Luggnagg, in Gulliver’s Travels, condemned to live on with diminished faculties into extreme old age.

   2016 October 29, Margaret Drabble, “Margaret Drabble: ‘I am not afraid of death. I worry about living’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

plural Struldbrugs · alternative struldbrug · alternative struldbrugg · alternative Struldbrugg

1. literarySomeone or something that is immortal or extremely ancient, but which may have persisted past the point where it should be dead.

   Antique memorial, exiled to Egypt's shame, Forlorn Struldbrug! why should we covet thee?

   1892, Donizetti Muller, Links from Broken Chains, page 64

   3 more examples

   It might be thought a precedent, and he would not like it; he who is to inherit the place when that old Struldbrug, Gotham, is withered and cast away, when that old log is so barnacle-bored as to be worthless.

   1887 April 9, Sabine Baring-Gould, “Richard Cable, the Lightshipman”, in Chambers's Journal, volume 4, number 171, page 229

   To me he is, like the greater number of classics in all ages and countries, a literary Struldbrug, rather than a true ambrosia-fed immortal.

   1908, Samuel Butler, Essays on Life, Art, and Science, page 32

   Apparently immortal, an anthropoid and vital Struldbrug, the Earl, 201 years old, is a red-haired naked beast, his forehead jutting out like a shelf.

   1940 March 28, Theodore Spencer, “Aldous Huxley: The Latest Phase”, in The Atlantic, →ISSN, review of After Many a Summer