The gravest problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a countrystile lest, by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and the injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against that part of her person which long usage has consecrated as the seat of castigation.
By reason of her exceeding beauty, her face was a full moon shining in the clearest sky; her hair was the purple cloud of autumn when, gravid with rain, it hangs low over earth; and her complexion mocked the pale waxen hue of the large-flowered jasmine.
Sir Richard Burton, Vikram and The Vampire. Amazon
It has been 15 years since Leibovitz's shock portrait of Demi Moore for the cover of Vanity Fair - naked, gravid, erotic and controversial enough at the time to be sold in a plain brown wrapper in stores across America's Midwest.
Mimi Spencer, The Observer, 14 May 2006. The Observer
It's the fiefdom of a high-bourgeois clan, lawyers, doctors, bankers, civil servants, hoteliers, distillers, brewers - the rank, yeasty smell of brewing is the distinctive smell of Edinburgh and the night air in summer is gravid with it.
Stewart Parker, The New York Times, 21 February 1982. New York Times
"Failure is nothing more than a few errors in judgment repeated every day; Success is just the opposite: a few simple disciplines practiced every day" - Ralph Marston