haphazard
A while ago I was reading a book that, for reasons unclear, kept trying to link everything to Peter Pan, which, if one is not a child (and even if one is), is a rather creepy text, with rather creepy details. A passage that has stuck with me and was unearthed from the further reaches of my memory by this book I cannot, unfortunately, identify: ‘He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth. When he saw she was a grown-up, he gnashed the little pearls at her.’ The combination of ‘ooze’, ‘entrancing’, ‘first teeth’, and ‘gnash’ is eldritch and unsettling and elicits, at least from me, a low buzz of anxiety and nausea. Curiously, any time I happen to look at the news, I find myself thinking: ‘so many foolish lost boys, gnashing at the teats of the nanny state with their vicious milk teeth.’