English

Noun

hearsomeness ‎(uncountable)

1. (rare) Obedience; submission to authority.
   • 1939, James Joyce, Finnegans Wake:

     Thus the hearsomeness of the burger felicitates the whole of the polis.

   • 1993, John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark:

     [...] his awakened "hearsomeness" causing him to misconstrue the sound, along Aristotelean lines, as the sound of thunder.

   • 1996, Christine Froula, Modernism's body:

     The cultural "bonum" that arrives by her Grace, issuing from the "malo" (apple/evil) of this "foenix culprit," consists in her streaming urine/words, which the Jarl's felicitous "hearsomeness" — his passion to keep her within his hearing and heir-ing [...]

Related terms

• hearsome