Viscous (pronounced vis-kuhs)
(1) Of a glutinous nature or consistency; sticky; thick; adhesive; having relatively high resistance to flow; Having a thick, sticky consistency between solid and liquid.
(2) Having the property of viscosity; of or pertaining to viscosity.
1350–1400: From the Middle English, from the Middle French visqueux and the Late Latin viscōsus, the construct in Latin being visc(um) (mistletoe, birdlime (made with mistletoe berries)) + -ōsus. The –ōsus suffix (familiar in English as –ous) was from Classical Latin from -ōnt-to-s from -o-wont-to-s, the latter form a combination of two primitive Indo-European suffixes: -went & -wont. Related to these were -entus and the Ancient Greek -εις (-eis) and all were used to form adjectives from nouns. In Latin, -ōsus was added to a noun to form an adjective indicating an abundance of that noun.
Viscous is a word widely used in many fields to impart the idea of stuff which (literally or figuratively) tends to stick together, usually in comparison with other stuff which in similar circumstances to some extent separates. One of the most established instances of use is in clinical psychology where its used to refer to the behavioural tendency in patients repetitively and circumstantially to talk about a restricted range of topics, something identified as common in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). These patients are said also to exhibit heightened levels of social cohesion and the tendency to become "interpersonally clingy" which manifests in prolonging interpersonal encounters. Clinicians have as a tool the Bear-Fedio self-report viscosity scale although it appears to be something which may be of most use when results are aggregated as a large data set because while one study found a laterality effect (left TLE patients exhibited greater viscosity than right TLE patients), other investigators using Bear-Fedio found no effect. It’s thought the contradictory findings may be a result of the small (five) number of items on the scale and Bear-Fedio fails to discriminate repetitive circumstantial speech from increased social cohesion so it may be that laterality effects, when observed, are associated with one of these behaviors and not the other.
Lindsay Lohan in Herbie: Fully Loaded: Viscosity in action.Synonyms include slimy, gooey, syrupy, adhesive, clammy, gelatinous, stiff, tenacious, thick, tough, glutinous, mucilaginous, viscid, gluey and ropy and the antonym is inviscid. Although the comparative is more viscous and the superlative most viscous, in chemistry, engineering and physics, technical terms line extraviscous semiviscous and hyperviscous abound. In science and engineering the derived terms include hyperviscous, pseudoviscous, elastoviscous, electroviscous, gyroviscous, isoviscous, nonviscous, semiviscous, ultraviscous, viscous damper, viscousless & viscosimeter. Viscous, viscid, viscoid & viscoidal are adjectives, viscously is an adverb, viscousness, viscosity, viscose & viscidity are nouns.
Kim Jong-un (b 1983), Supreme Leader of DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)), admiring the viscosity of industrial lubricant.
In the physics of fluid dynamics, viscosity is the quantity expressing the magnitude of internal friction in a fluid, as measured by the force per unit area resisting uniform flow. Many industrial lubricants have high viscosity and low viscosity lubricants typically are used in light-duty applications where lower loads (and consequently lower temperatures) are present. Viscosity is a measure of the frictional force between adjacent layers of fluid in motion. A fluid with no resistance is called an ideal (or inviscid) fluid but such substances exist only in controlled laboratory conditions because the second law of thermodynamics requires all fluids to have positive viscosity. Fluids with a high viscosity, such as pitch (aka bitumen, asphalt or tar), can appear to be a solid but experiments, conducted over decades, confirm their flow.
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