Word: downstrike Part of Speech: verb Etymology: From down + strike. 1. To strike down; to knock down, kill, or cripple. Example: Nearly twenty years have elapsed since my friend was downstruck by his attack. Example: God does not downstrike me, a god ? 2. To dismay, reject, demote, or render lowly. Example: Did you imagine us bigguns your servants, mebbe, or some such downstruck types?' 'Nobody were downstruck there. They were all with telling me what to do. Example: I tried to animate myself to behave a little more social, turning in circles a couple of times, making a slinky stepping pattern, and generally quickening my behavior in order to appear more alert and excited. I was not picked. I was downstruck. I felt the world had collapsed for me! 3. To arc to ground in a downstrike. Example: While a number of successful interruptions were made with this chute, it exhibited a proneness to "downstrike." The arc would run down one of the baffles onto one of the arcing contacts and short- circuit a portion of the metallic baffle stack. 4. To strike from above. Example: This was a downstriking hammer which hit the strings at a point where a silk band revolved against them, activated by a treadle. Example: The wood in the Luberon looked back at him, the shafts of downstriking sunlight, the tiny scrap of fluttering light. 5. To move downward in a striking motion. Example: Parsival bounced upright and as the fellow reined close and chopped a swordstroke at his head the young knight, forgetting his own weapon in his rage, caught the downstriking arm with both hands and heaved the shocked man up out of his seat, across his own horse's neck, and spinning down the hill after his companion who was still rolling, quite slowly now, in the lush green field. Example: For example, a short card requiring minimum carding of short fibres may be designed to take fibres from the feed rollers using a downstriking licker straight to the cylinder. 6. To go in a downward direction. Example: Those which are full of spindly, ingrowing wood we will thin rigorously, working with one of the nursery models before our mind's eye, and taking care that when our task is done, not a single ingrowing or downstriking shoot is left on the tree. Example: A parent-child dialogue is a downstriking dialogue and a child-parent dialogue is an upstriking dialogue. 7. To point (finish a joint) by pressing mortar in at the bottom. Example: There was no trace of plaster inside the stair tower in the Barns: most of the interior was in brick, and the mortar pointing was downstruck and usually scored. Example: A struck joint is made by running the trowel along the joint before the mortar is hard, either pressing in at the top: upstruck (or weathered), which exposes the mortar to the weather, or pressing in at the bottom: downstruck (or struck). 8. To play a stringed instrument with a downward plucking motion. Example: Armstrong doesn't use the story-within-a-story motif; his version begins with a New Orleans funeral jazz slow shuffle, picking up the tempo at 0.08, led by Armstrong's trumpet, trailed by the unmistakably wildly wandering New Orleans clarinet, skeletal barrelhouse piano, downstruck banjo and the ragged-shoed chuf-chuf-chuf of the melancholic New Orleans swing.