John - I'm only responding because I thought I would be the last man alive to use "divelicate" or any of its variations, and now you've used it, so I must climb back to the top of the heap. And, in so doing, I discovered that I would have been particularly safe in my position, because I also misspelled the word (which explains why you couldn't google it, if you tried.) It's "divellicate/divellication".
I found it years ago in a moldering Walker's Rhyming Dictionary that was printed in Britain in, I would guess, the Thirties. The entire dictionary is in reverse alphabetical order, it provides words but no meanings, and it contains some of the most arcane language imaginable. I had no idea what that particular word meant, but found it in another of my moldering reference works - a three volume, 3000 page Webster's - it's archaic, from the French divellere, and means to pluck at, to twitch, to pull apart.
Last edited by Michael Cantor; 01-28-2010 at 01:01 PM.
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