abortive

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abortive

[ə′bȯrd·iv]

(biology)

Imperfectly formed or developed.

References in periodicals archive ?

Israel Knox defines it as "playful chaos in a serious [and coercive] world." (25) Such a world is characterized by a serious chaotic condition such as the post-colony promises--"disarray, bewilderment, the incompatibility of means and ends, the pervasiveness of evil, the abortiveness of hope and happiness." (26) Comedy, however, carves a world of its own playful and make-believe chaos out of this serious and coercive chaos of life and nature as a liberatory necessity, in Knox's words.

Hilarity and the Nigerian condition

Time and again, Mary Shelley saves her project from charges of abortiveness by reconstructing the now-vanished Percy Shelley into a monument of textual wholeness: I do not know whether the critics will reprehend the insertion of some of the most imperfect among [Shelley's works]; but I frankly own that I have been more actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should escape me than the wish of presenting nothing but what was complete to the fastidious reader.

Mary Shelley's editions of The Collected Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Editor as Subject

What is strange about the Bee Gees' example, however, is the resultant insularity, even abortiveness of their sound from that period.