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What does "onomatopoeic" mean in this context?

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kathy79
 
Reply Thu 22 Mar, 2018 09:50 pm
It’s easy enough to march to the urban fox’s beat. They are those
most onomatopoeic of creatures: crepuscular. They live, by
preference and as befits brilliant physiological generalists, along
the mucky tideline where the night washes into the day.

------In the above, what does "onomatopoeic" mean? Does it mean the urban fox is the most onomatopoeic creature? Could you please paraphrase that expression?
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fresco
 
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Reply Fri 23 Mar, 2018 03:08 am
@kathy79,
A paraphrase would be difficult. The sound of the word 'crepuscular' (meaning 'at twighlight') can be said to evoke the sound of the sea at the shoreline 'where the night washes into the day'. And perhaps (non) onomatopoeically , the word 'crepuscular' may also evoke a picture of 'a silent creeping muscular' animal, thereby making the choice of the wotd even more apt.
centrox
 
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Reply Fri 23 Mar, 2018 06:48 am
@fresco,
fresco wrote:
And perhaps (non) onomatopoeically , the word 'crepuscular' may also evoke a picture of 'a silent creeping muscular' animal, thereby making the choice of the wotd even more apt.

Yes. Yes. yes. This is poetry, where the rules of prose do not apply.
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ekename
 
  1  
Reply Sat 24 Mar, 2018 09:04 pm
@kathy79,
Being a Beast

Quote:

Charles Foster wanted to know what it was like to be a beast: a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, a swift. What it was really like. And through knowing what it was like he wanted to get down and grapple with the beast in us all.

So he tried it out; he lived life as a badger for six weeks, sleeping in a dirt hole and eating earthworms, he came face to face with shrimps as he lived like an otter and he spent hours curled up in a back garden in East London and rooting in bins like an urban fox.


The author's reference to the urban fox as onomatopoetic is a pun on the word crepuscular. As a natural scientist of renown, he would know that while creeping, stealthy fox are primarily nocturnal they are diurnal and therefore crepuscular.
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