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Literary notes about rudimentary (AI summary)

In literature, “rudimentary” is employed to evoke a sense of the basic, undeveloped, or primitive state of a subject—be it a physical structure, natural process, or abstract idea. Writers utilize the term to describe early forms of organs or anatomical features, as in discussions of embryonic development and vestigial structures ([1], [2], [3]), while others apply it metaphorically to depict the nascent or elementary stages of emotions, societal constructs, or intellectual faculties ([4], [5], [6]). Whether outlining the preliminary mechanics of nature through detailed scientific observation or critiquing the simplicity of cultural institutions, the word consistently connotes something that exists in an incipient, almost provisional form ([7], [8]).
  1. Rudimentary organs in the individuals of the same species are very liable to vary in the degree of their development and in other respects.
    — from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin
  2. Thus we can understand the greater relative size of rudimentary organs in the embryo, and their lesser relative size in the adult.
    — from On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin
  3. However different the extremities of the four-footed Craniotes may be in their adult state, they all develop from the same rudimentary structure.
    — from Paradise Lost by John Milton
  4. She does understand herself, she has some rudimentary control over her own growth.
    — from Howards End by E. M. Forster
  5. He might suffer the least rudimentary twinge of conscience in whatever he did, and in just so far he was evil and sinning.
    — from Sister Carrie: A Novel by Theodore Dreiser
  6. Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.
    — from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana
  7. But it is much more rudimentary in the inferior religions than in the others, so we are better able to determine its reason for existence here.
    — from The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life by Émile Durkheim
  8. Use and disuse must have come into play and reduced the function to its present rudimentary condition.
    — from Erewhon; Or, Over the Range by Samuel Butler

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