A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of interest to Catholics, complaining that the newly revised translation of the Mass is ‘lumpen, difficult and odd’. What would you think he meant by lumpen?
Or try this, from a recent review in the TLS of a biography of Jack London, commenting on an example of detail in The People of the Abyss (1903): ‘a deceptively lumpen old man who gently tucks a rogue strand of hair behind his wife’s ear’.
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