Colin Dexter used it in a Morse novel, describing the progress of a verger going up the aisle of a church handing out hymn books.

Ooh. LM used it in a cow poem, I think. CD is just showing off there, isn't he?

Btw, widdershins is one of my favourite words too, which is why I was so pleased recently to discover (and to use) deisil, which is (literally) its opposite.

Robert Frost has a character (Dick) expound on "Boustrophedon" to another farmhand (Pike) in "From Plane to Plane:"

“I wouldn’t hoe both ways for anybody!”


“And right you are. You do the way we do

In reading, don’t you Bill?—at every line end

Pick up your eyes and carry them back idle

Across the page to where we started from.

The other way of reading back and forth,

Known as boustrophedon, was found too awkward.”

David, Robert Francis uses both widdershins and its opposite (repeatedly) in an homage to Auden. It appeared in The New Yorker in 1956: https://books.google.com/books?id=B9...hins&f=fa lse

The Pen as Pecker
 

The Pope of Poetry’s faux candor
Ex cathedra damns all banter.

The Villain of Verse has proved he’s callous,
Vetting verse with vicious malice.

Thank you for that link, Aaron. I read the poem, and enjoyed it. What depth of reading does it require to be able to reference that at will? (A rhetorical question, although you can answer it if you wish.)

And what about cancrizans, which is utterly new to me? I'll cheat. I'll Google it right now.

Cheers

David

The fruits of Googling ... brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cixn7IRsP6g

In our small Paris garden, we have a pond in which we planted what my wife calls a “nénuphar” (although it’s actually a nymphéa). A few years ago, we were greatly surprised to see a number of visiting iridescent libellules hovering over the pond. Where did all those dragonflies come from in Paris? We haven’t seen them since.

Whoa, check out the journey of nenuphar into French through Arabic, through Middle Persian, from a Sanskrit compound:
From Medieval Latin nenuphar, from Arabic نِلُوفَر (nilūfar), نِينُوفَر (nīnūfar), from Middle Persian nylw(k)pl (nīlōpal, “lotus, water-lily”), from Sanskrit नीलोत्पल (nīlotpala), from नील (nīla, “blue”) + उत्पल (utpala, “lotus, water-lily”)