The car slows as we near a clearing on the mountainside, a place barnacled with hundreds of huts made from woven palm fronds.
2002 — Mark Spragg, The Fruit of Stone, Vintage Books (2011), →ISBN, page 232:
They rode beside wind-pitted knobs of rock, broken free of the nativegrass, barnacled with yellow, black, and blood-colored lichens, and rough to the touch.
2007 — Aileen G. Baron, The Gold of Thrace, Poisoned Pen Press (2007), →ISBN, page 1:
She had come to see Ephesus, banking and trading center of the east Mediterranean in Roman times; capital and principal port of the province of Asia; the richest city in the Roman Empire; city of Artemis, the famous Diana of Ephesus, who was barnacled with mammaries from her neck to her waist.
2008 — Barbara Kyle, The Queen's Lady, Kensington Books (2009), →ISBN, page 264:
Honor tracked down Thornleigh late that very evening. Her inquiries of him among clothiers at the Drapers Guild and the Merchant Adventurer's Company had led her, following his trail, to the cockpits and taverns that barnacled the precincts around Greenwich Palace.
Your space pants have thick Velcro strips across the thighs so you can stick your favourite toys to your legs and fly around barnacled with notepads, pens, and cameras.
In La Rochelle, in the screened-off bedchamber the boy had shared with his five brothers and sisters, he had leaned out of the narrow window when the others were asleep and watched the shift and jostle of the masts in the harbor as they scraped the star-barnacled sky.
2011 — Peter Godwin, "Burning My Father", in The Princeton Reader: Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University (ed. John McPhee & Carol Rigolot), Princeton University Press (2011), →ISBN, page 67:
The old black gravedigger, Robert, has his hand in front of me now. His palm is yellow, and barnacled with calluses.
As I roll south down a car-barnacled Hollywood surface street an unchanging pair of headlights in the Benz's rearview makes me think I'm being tailed again.
2011 — Cait Oliver, Laying the Ghost: A Return to Culloden, Strategic Book Publishing (2011), →ISBN, page 61:
"I entered the outer walls, walking carefully, and stared with great fascination at them, barnacled with lichen, as they were. There as a chapel with many graves-"
2011 — Hampton Sides, Hellbound on His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History, Anchor Books (2011), →ISBN, page 137:
It was a long, gritty Appian way into Memphis, a road awash in acrid lights and crowded with mud-barnacled pickup trucks.
Or maybe it was her mother who pushed the first seeds into the ground there under the library window, thinking what a pleasure it would be to glance through the glass while going about her work and see the thick thrust of green stem, barnacled with bloom.
Adjective: "familiar with the ocean and/or seafaring"[edit]
1924 — H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fourth Series, Alfred A. Knopf (1924), page 159:
He is the true heir, not only of the old-time Indian fighters and train-robbers, but also of the tough and barnacled deep-water sailors, now no more.
2009 — Maxine Cass, Off the Beaten Path: Northern California: A Guide to Unique Places, Globe Pequot (2009), →ISBN, page 72:
Two miles east of Swift Street at 701 West Cliff Drive, at the north tip of Monterey Bay, is a small, brick lighthouse containing the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum. Started by a few barnacled old surf veterans, the museum traces sixty years of the sport […]
2010 — Harv Nowland, Dawn Light: Beyond the Pale, WestBow Press (2010), →ISBN, page 55:
"Of course, Sarah," replied the captain. "You must forgive your barnacled uncle. I'm much too accustomed to talking with coarse seamen — rough seamen much like our young Nathan here."
2010 — R.J. Rubadeau, Bound for Roque Island: Sailing Maine and the World, Hillcrest Publishing Group (2010), →ISBN, page 59:
In the racing world of the day only two positions on a Class A ocean racer were paid: captain and cook. And those barnacled owners who were successful campaigners knew that you couldn't swing a dead cat in a waterfront bar in Newport without hitting a half-dozen captains looking for a ride.
1829 — "J", "The Greenwich Pensioner", The Gentleman's Pocket Magazine and Album of Literature and Fine Arts, Joseph Robins (1829):
Ye of the "land-interest," ye soft-faced young sparks, who think with terror upon a razor on a frosty morning, — ye suffering old gentlemen, who pause at a linen-draper's, and pass the flannel between your fingers, as time verges towards October,— ye martyrs to a winter cough — ye racked with a quarterly tooth-arche — all ye of household ailings, look upon this hacked, shivered piece of clay, this Greenwich pensioner: consider of how many of his powers he is despoiled; see where the cutlass and the boarding-pike have ploughed up and pierced his flesh; see where the bullet has glanced, singeing by; and when you have reckoned up, if they are to reckoned, his many scars — above all, look at his hard, contented, weather-barnacled face, and then, gentle spectators, complain of your rheums, your joint-twitchings, your corns!
2010 — Pat DeMono, "The Train", in Back to Buckhaven and Other Short Stories, AuthorHouse (2010), →ISBN, page 101:
He'd watched those hands push curls back from her forehead when she was studying a canvas. He'd held them in his own rough and barnacled ones. No, the ring in the box was much too large.
"Simon it is important that you study this place carefully, look," as she spoke Mavis pointed a barnacled finger off to the right. Following her crooked finger, I could make out something about four miles in the distance. Yes, it was a large church.
Adjective: "marked by personal experiences; worldly"[edit]
Capra's peasant origins were plain to read from his short, hardy frame, his olive skin, and his earthy features, once described by Graham Greene as "bushy eyebrows, big nose and the kind of battered face which looks barnacled with life, encrusted with ready sympathies."
Ben had been a man barnacled in legend, but beyond a few fragmentary stories, Castle knew little about him.
2010 — Sarah Hina, Plum Blossoms in Paris, Medallion Press, Inc. (2010), →ISBN, page 191:
We cannot discard our histories in the course of a day. We cannot build new cities, either. The pages behind me flutter in the draft. I shudder and fancy myself falling forward, pitching this body with its barnacled heart into the swell below.
2011 — Kel Palmer, A Roving Commission, iUniverse (2011), →ISBN, page 195:
As each story flushed out another barnacled memory, it was clear that we'd all seen events at Bruggen from different angles.
Adjective: "encumbered with something unnecessary or undesirable"[edit]
1999 — Mary Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics, Pluto Press (1999), →ISBN, page 97:
She described her embarrassment when, as a WSPU member, she had been compelled to share a platform with middle-class suffragettes during the Bury St. Edmunds by-election of 1907 (see Chapter 2) who were 'barnacled with the prejudices of their circle, instinctively hostile to other classes and other races'.
2009 — Kurt Edward Kemper, College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era, University of Illinois Press (2009), →ISBN, page 60:
"American higher education has permitted its intellectual pilings to become…barnacled with a host of secondary functions" such as "undue emphasis on football."
2010 — Jane Fonda, "Reuniting the Head, the Heart, and the Body", in Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change (ed. Stephanie Marohn), Elite Books (2010), →ISBN, page 49:
What we're seeing now is the balance so out of kilter, so barnacled with the wrong kind of power and lust.
2010 — Frederick M. Hess, The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas, Harvard University Press (2010), →ISBN, page 211:
There is a great deal to rethink and a long way to journey, not because some flavor-of-the-month pop intellectual has announced that our civilization is at stake, but because perhaps our greatest democratic legacy is a confused, anachronistic, and barnacled mess.
2010 — Neil J. Smelser, Reflections on the University of California: From the Free Speech Movement to the Global University, University of California Press (2010), →ISBN, page 221:
The American research universities are barnacled by inertia and incapacity to adapt.