fever swamp
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.69 in modern English
23
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
1
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An area of stagnant water and hot temperatures that acts as a breeding ground for disease vectors such as mosquitos.
Example Sentences
- "Then Christmas Day dawned, and there was Vicksburg lifted two hundred feet above the fever swamps, her court-house shining in the morning sun."
- "In the evenings he sat on deck with a lantern, and men and women gathered round to listen to him telling tales about fever swamps, elephant hunts and mountains infested with leopard."
- "Explorers from Bruce to Speke, Thomson and Grant, nought to penetrate its secrets, but the malarial climate, the fever swamps and tangled forests, not to speak of wild beasts and savage men, barred the way."
- "Into the fever swamps, they marched us . . . And they set us to work draining the swampland and toiling in the sun . . . . . . They set us to toiling . . . They took the white fleece of the cotton and the sweetness of the sugarcane and made them bitter and bloody with our toil . . ."
- "Only a few years earlier, the neocons had been denouncing them as coming from "the fever swamps", in the words of Decter."
- "Rafferty was a florid public speaker and aspiring demagogue who emerged from what even a conservative like William Rusher described as “the fever swamp of rightist kookery in southern California."
Etymology
The original term sprang from the belief that the swamp itself caused illnesses such as malaria and cholera, before the role of disease vectors was understood. The political use of the term is generally attributed to the neoconservative journalist Midge Decter, as a metaphor for right-wing political extremists as breeding ground for crazy ideas.