Hairy Trivia
Oxford American
Writer's Thesaurus
I can't resist this thesaurus. I even brought it to the SAT class I teach on Sundays and used it to help kids build their SAT vocabulary. They loved it! While looking for a word that that meant "great amount" (chose plenitude), I stumbled across another David Foster Wallace comment -- this time about the word hairy. This ref is found on pg. 400 and is way too long for me to quote in its entirety. (Gotta love the synchronicity of DFW doing the word hairy -- can just picture him slaving over this entry). Anyway .... enjoy... I think it's one of my favorite entries to date:
"There are maybe more descriptors for various kinds of hair and hairiness than any other word-set in English, and some of them are extremely strange and fun. The more pedestrian terms like shaggy, unshorn, bushy, coiffed, and so on we'll figure you already know. The adjective barbigerous is an extremely uptown synonym for bearded. Cirrose and cirrous,from the Latin cirrus meaning "curl" or "fringe" (as in cirrus clouds), can both be used to refer to somebody's curly or tufty or wispy/feathery hair -- Nicolas Cage's hair in Adaptation is cirose. Crinite men "hairy or possessed of a hair-like appendage," though it's mainly a botanical term and would be a bit eccentric applied to a person. Crinose, however, is a peoppl-adj that means "having a lot of hair," especially in the sense of one's hair being really long."
So this goes on and on for another column and a half and ends with a N.B. that tells you to keep the OED close at hand if you're thinking of "using any of the more esoteric adjectives here."
Gotcha! Hirsute is as crazy as I'll go when it comes to hairy. Then again tomentose means covered with little matted hairs - such as baby chimps, hobbits' feet and Robin Williams. That might be the winner!