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morass

[muh-ras]

Origin

noun

a tract of low, soft, wet ground.

a marsh or bog.

marshy ground.

any confusing or troublesome situation, especially one from which it is difficult to free oneself; entanglement.

Origin:
1645–55; < Dutch moeras, alteration (by association with moer marsh; compare moor¹) of Middle Dutch maras < Old French mareis < Germanic. See marsh

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Morass is always a great word to know.

So is doohickey. Does it mean:

a gadget; dingus; thingumbob.

a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

morass (məˈræs)

—n
1.	a tract of swampy low-lying land
2.	a disordered or muddled situation or circumstance, esp one that impedes progress

[C17: from Dutch moeras, ultimately from Old French maraismarsh]

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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

morass

"wet, swampy tract," 1655, from Du. moeras "marsh, fen," from M.Du. marasch, from O.Fr. marais "marsh," from Frank., possibly from W.Gmc. *marisk, from P.Gmc. *mariskaz "like a lake," from *mari "sea." The M.Du. word was infl. by Du. moer "moor" (see moor (n.)). Fig. use is attested from 1867.

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"Even beyond their deaths, the two novelists stand in contrariety. Tolstoy, the foremost heir to the traditions of the epic; Dostoevsky, one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare; Tolstoy, the mind intoxicated with reason and fact; Dostoevsky, the contemner of rationalism, the great lover of paradox; Tolstoy, the poet of the land, of the rural setting and pastoral mood; Dostoevsky, the arch-citizen, the master-builder of the modern metropolis in the province of language; Tolstoy, thirsting for the truth, destroying himself and those about him in excessive pursuit of it; Dostoevsky, rather against the truth than against Christ, suspicious of total understanding and on the side of mystery; Tolstoy, "keeping at all times," in Coleridge's phrase, "in the high road of life"; Dostoevsky, advancing into the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellarage and morass of the soul; Tolstoy, like a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking the realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience; Dostoevsky, always on the verge of the hallucinatory, of the spectral, always vulnerable to daemonic intrusions into what might prove, in the end, to have been merely a tissue of dreams; Tolstoy, the embodiment of health and Olympian vitality; Dostoevsky, the sum of energies charged with illness and possession."

-George Steiner

morass

mo·rass