turgid

adj

1. Distended beyond the natural state by some internal agent, especially fluid, or expansive force.

   “I have a turgid limb.”

   “A vegetable that is fully moist and firm will seem both crisp and more tender than the same vegetable limp from water loss. When we bite down on a vegetable turgid with water, the already-stressed cell walls readily break and the cells burst open; in a limp vegetable, chewing compresses the walls together, and we have to exert much more pressure to break through them.”

2. Of a river, inundated with excess water as from a flood; swollen.

   “The Jiet River lay before them, as thick and turgid as a gorged snake, its crosshatched surface reflecting the same ghastly hue that pervaded the Burning Plains.”

3. Overly complex and difficult to understand; grandiloquent; bombastic.

   “These were all basic tenets, but the principals wrote them down as if they had never heard them before—and maybe they hadn’t, or at least not for many years. Perhaps that’s why bureaucratic prose becomes so turgid, whatever the bureaucracy.”

   “Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom’s turgid studies of artistic influenza[…]”

   “Published TV-scholarship sure reflects this mood. And the numbingly dull quality to most “literary” television analyses is due less to the turgid abstraction scholars employ to make television seem an OK object of aesthetic inquiry […]”