Harry was unsuccessful in his oral defenestration of the grape seeds, which were now sliding ungracefully down the inside of the half open passenger window of Sally's otherwise immaculately kempt vehicle, leaving a trail of the kind that remains visible until chemicals are used in the cleaning.
As dhess pointed out below it's a moment from a scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally. The wording above, however, is my own.
That scene just happened to pop into my head when I read the word defenestration, so I decided I'd like to "use it in a sentence". I've read some Pynchon in my time, too, so I have a penchant for densely descriptive prose. I'm glad it was appreciated.
"In December 1840, Abraham Lincoln and four other Illinois legislators jumped out of a window in a political maneuver designed to prevent a quorum on a vote that would have eliminated the Illinois State Bank."
Imagining something like this happening today is ... difficult, to say the least.
Oregon ended up having State Senators flee across State lines. Even one going so far as to warn law enforcement to send unmarried men without families to try to forcibly collect them.
When there is as much on the line as there is in America's legislative system, you will be surprised the shenanigans that ensue.
The business of the Congress at one point had to ban the practice of dueling. Not necessarily because it wasn't seen as a way to settle a dispute, but that it happened so often. Kentucky I think is the state that specifically disqualifies legislators based on participation in duels.
Robert's Rules of Order are often looked upon those with a darker sense of humor in the same light as the Third-man out rule in hockey. Ruins all the good fights.
Though Asia has been known for some doozies. I recall the use of either a chainsaw or fire axe at one point.
Reminds of a particular Family Guy episode, as it is the only time I have heard the term:
Dennis Miller: Now I don't want to go on a rant here, but America's foreign policy makes about as much sense as Beowulf having sex with Robert Fulton at the first Battle of Antietam. I mean, when a neo-conservative defenestrates, it's like Raskalnikov filibuster deoxymonohydroxinate.
Is this a joke?
The assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand was always the explanation for the start of WWI for me and everyone I've had the chance to speak, and there are at least two world wide known bands related to the event.
The wars OP referred to are much older ones, e.g. : "The term was coined around the time of an incident in Prague Castle in the year 1618 which became the spark that started the Thirty Years' War."
There’s a generation of nerds who learned this word from the glossary of the Apple ][ manual which included, ”defenestration: The act of throwing something or someone out of a window.“
I was in my kid's secondary school student support office one morning where one student was telling his friend about the time his dad threw him through a window. It wasn't a big, heavy conversation, just a recounting of it as something that was a bit of a novelty.
So I pipe up and say, "Hey, there's even a word for that!" which in a strange way left them somewhat pleased.
When I was in high school, we used to refer jokingly to "defenstration of an ecdysiast." I don't remember where we got it from, but it usually was brought up in connection to the highly exaggerated and dramatic way teens tend to tell a lengthy story about their day as if it was the most interesting story ever.
I wonder if that happened like in a violent fashion like when someone is tossed out of a bar by a bouncer or did it happen like in the cartoons when a prisoner walks slowly over a board into the sea from a pirate ship.
The French word for window is "fenêtre". And in French, the circumflex accent usually denotes a deletion of an 's', as in words such as "forêt", "hôpital", "île", "conquête".
Something I learned here - the English word window comes from an old Germanic word vendauga meaning "wind eye". German started using something like fenster vendauga (I don't know the actual phrase) to mean "a window with glass in it", from the Latin word fenestra. It later dropped the vendauga bit entirely.
English has now borrowed the word fenster from German, to mean the erosion of a new bit of rock exposing an older bit.
Ventana and Window are root aligned (ventus, wind), fenestra in latin is "light opening", no idea how Portugal ended up with "door" for windows (Janus, janua, janela) ..
to me defenestration is always sounded like a process that removes intestines but every time I mention it to someone who knows German they say fenster means window
