Faulkner decoded

Chapter IV of Absalom, Absalom! repeats the word durance several times, as in the passage, “…Henry waited four years, holding the three of them in that abeyance, that durance, waiting, hoping, for Bon to renounce…” It doesn’t quite mean the way it looks. My Compact Oxford glosses it as “archaic imprisonment (in durance vile),” but yet there is an etymologic connection to durable and one of Bill’s favorite words, endure.

Sutpen’s adjunctive (ch. VII, “when he repudiated that first wife and that child when he discovered that they would not be adjunctive to the forwarding of the design”) is also in the desktop dictionaries, but only as a related form to the main entry, and adjectival form of another adjective, not unlike his own attitude to spouse and spawn.

Doggery is clear from context (ch. VII, “doggeries and taverns now become hamlets, hamlets now become villages, villages now towns”), yet only turns up in American Heritage as “dogs, collectively.” Merriam-Webster adds the more apposite slang definition, “cheap saloon.”