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Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (transitive verb)
[AD-ahm-brayt', ah-DUM-brayt'] 
1. to provide a faint or incomplete representation or outline of: "Peter had difficulty finding any authoritative sources of information, but he was able to adumbrate a biography from various articles on file at the library."
2. to give an indistinct or vague warning about a future event; foreshadow
3. to disclose partially
4. to overshadow or obscure
noun form: adumbration
adjective form: adumbrative
adverb form: adumbratively
Origin:
Approximately 1581; from Latin, 'adumbratus,' past participle of 'adumbrare': to represent in outline ('ad-': to + 'umbra': shadow). In action:
"At Dragon Fountain Lake we had a tree to look at. It was a towering object, a cedar of some description, I guessed, and we stood before it in a small huddle, our necks craning heavenward, while our guide adumbrated its height, its age, the circumference of its trunk, its estimated number of needles; she listed the poets who had girded it in metaphor, the painters who had seized its essence with a few deft brush strokes. More tour groups arrived and formed patient queues behind us.
My mind, I'm afraid, temporarily stood easy under the assault of so much arboreal trivia, and when it snapped back to attention, I discovered the guide had been telling us that we were on our own for the next one and a half hours. She had, it seemed, been giving us detailed instructions about which path to take in order to get back to the minibus in time. I trudged off with the others, but she could tell I hadn't been listening.
'English friend!' she cried in a reproachful squeal through the megaphone. Approximately 100 heads turned. 'Do you know where you're going?'
'Not really,' I called back. 'Don't worry. I'll just follow group No. 28. Wherever they go, I'll go.'
'Well, don't get lost and hold us up.'"
Chris Taylor. "The Chinese Friend," [Fate brings together an outcast and a foreigner on a bus tour in China.] Salon.com (April 6, 1998).
"'Now you have freely given me leave to love,
����What will you do?'
Carew's 'Ask me no more' is a coruscation of hyperboles, but is a fresh and effective appeal to the heart of a woman. And this is what the metaphysicals are often doing in their unwearied play with conceits, delightfully naughty, extravagant, fantastic, frigid�they succeed in stumbling upon some conceit which reveals a fresh intuition into the heart, or states an old plea with new and prevailing force. And the divine poets express with the same blend of argument and imagination the deep and complex currents of religious feeling which were flowing in England throughout the century, institutional, theological, mystical, while in the metaphysical subtleties of conceit they found something that is more than conceit, symbols in which to express or adumbrate their apprehensions of the infinite."
Herbert J.C. Grierson, ed. (1886-1960). "Introduction," Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th Century�(1921).
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