Mary Roach
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The Swampy History of Morass
We won't swamp you with details: morass comes from the Dutch word moeras, which itself derives from an Old French word, maresc, meaning “marsh.” Morass has been part of English for centuries, and in its earliest uses was a synonym of swamp or marsh. (That was the sense Robert Louis Stevenson used when he described Long John Silver emerging from “a low white vapour that had crawled during the night out of the morass” in Treasure Island.) Imagine walking through a thick, muddy swamp: it's easy to compare such slogging to an effort to extricate yourself from a sticky situation. By the mid-19th century, morass had gained a figurative sense, and could refer to any predicament that was as murky, confusing, or difficult to navigate as a literal swamp.
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Examples of morass in a Sentence
Andre Gee, Rolling Stone, 5 Nov. 2024
Even far from the morass of toxic politics, misinformation and conspiracy theories, this software is eroding our trust in what’s true and displacing it with bizarre hallucinations.
—Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 17 Oct. 2024
Again, the source material already provides the spinoff with fresh purpose: These stories are fundamentally explorations of what knighthood means as a philosophy and an institution in the moral morass that is Westeros.
—Nicholas Quah, Vulture, 8 Aug. 2024
American Idiot the album is still a potent political missive, a reminder of all the ways that art can speak truth to power — and somewhere in the morass of this new revival, there’s a nugget of that.
—Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 18 Oct. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Morass.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morass. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.
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