The two proud dowagers, Lady Lynn and Lady Ingram, confabulate together.
– Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

It is not that they lie in the experimental situation, but that they confabulate; they fill in the gaps, guess, speculate, mistake theorizing for observing.
– Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

Thus the coping strategies of the two hemispheres are fundamentally different. The left hemisphere's job is to create a belief system or model and to fold new experiences into that belief system. If confronted with some new information that doesn't fit the model, it relies on Freudian defense mechanisms to deny, repress or confabulate – anything to preserve the status quo.
– Oliver Sacks, et al., Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

Bricks had spilled down in a talus to the floor of the tunnel. Boxer half scrambled, half slid in, raising clouds of dust.
– Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, The Cabinet of Curiosities

Hairston underwent surgery in November to remove the talus bone from his left ankle. He described it as a minor procedure during which he had a bone chip removed.
– Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 30, 2005

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Originally posted by wordcrafter:.

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Originally posted by gooofy:
The first meaning is from the 17th century, from the noun confabulation from the late 15th. My Oxford Etymological dictionary doesn't have the second meaning. I wonder how it arose.

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Fantasia on A Theme of Thomas Talus

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Originally posted by Richard English:
And my wife used to sing under RVW...

It went with his elegant clothes, his shoes with woven vamps, the glaze of his hair.
– Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex: A Novel

Playing Lola calls for a woman alluring enough to seduce a man into selling his soul to the devil. Gillentine succeeded … in creating a vamp who prowls across the stage …
– Kate Mattingly, Dance Magazine, June, 2006

… first I must have a new dress. I can't vamp this man with these dirty rags I am in.
– Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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Originally posted by arnie:

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Fantasia on A Theme of Thomas Talus

Hey! I object to my neighbour (a few years ago admittedly) having his name taken in vain. His name was Thomas Tallis! He's buried under St Alfege's, a church near me.

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vamp – 1. the upper front part of a shoe or boot 2. [abbreviation of vampire] a woman who uses sexual attraction to exploit men (verb: to so use)

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Uhhh, arnie, that was supposed to be a pun.

Our electioneering racers have started for the prize. … Oh what a rare sport it will be! Through thick and thin, through mire and dirt, through bogs and fens and sloughs, dashing and splashing and crying out, the devil take the hindmost.
– John Adams, quoted in his biography by David McCullough

… the sloughs of abjection and misery …
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

But here in the North I would slough off my Southern ways of speech.
– Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Parts of our spongy tract [the definition of a 'novel'] seem more fictitious than other parts, it is true: near the middle, on a tump of grass, stand Miss Austen … and Thackeray … But no intelligent remark known to me will define the tract as a whole. All we can say of it is that it is bounded by two chains of mountains … the opposing ranges of Poetry and of History …
– E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

I've never myself been a true football fan; I just like watching the players tump over on the field.
– Kinky Friedman, Spanking Watson

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It just seemed a good chance to get Thomas Tallis's name mentioned. He's not appreciated nowadays, and, as I said, he was a neighbour of mine.

Small-volume luxury food imports [to Greenland] probably included honey to ferment into mead, plus salt as a preservative.
– Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Leave the mead to ferment and when this has ended, put in a quarter of an ounce of isinglass (available from wine-making supply stores) and bung the cask tightly.
– Raymond Buckland, Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft

The fire roared and the flames winked yellow behind the little isinglass windows in the front of the stove.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I went out and saw the thin pools of water standing on the black ground, like sheets of isinglass.
– Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

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Small-volume luxury food [to Greenland] probably included honey to ferment into mead, plus salt as a preservative.
– Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

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If Mr. Diamond is refering to historical matters here, I doubt that salt would have been either small-volume or a luxury item. I expect that it would have been an essential, everyday commodity used in substantial quantities for curing salt codfish.

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The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn’t adapt to the country’s changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites. One scientist sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm and found only three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five thousand bones from the garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones. How can this be? Greenland is a fisherman’s dream: Diamond describes running into a Danish tourist in Greenland who had just caught two Arctic char in a shallow pool with her bare hands. “Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland . . . starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding,” he writes. “Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows?” It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse didn’t eat fish. For one reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against it.