What sterile growths of sexless root Or epicene? What flower of kisses without fruit Of love, Faustine?

Lewis is again Malvolio, but a strutting, epicene version, rather than the earnest, humorless striver he gave us before.

It is impossible to read Webb and conclude that he has anything but loathing for the Fortunate Sons--the Jeb Bushes and Mitt Romneys--and the epicene polemicists who do their masters' bidding.

While contemporaries did find the king's appearance youthful, Moore's virtually unlined face and almost epicene appearance exaggerate that vision: He really is a boy in love.

See also Samuel Daniel's castigation of mirrors and flatterers in his 1599 Musophilus (61) and Truewit's report of Morose's barber "having broken his glasse in a former despair" in Ben Jonson's 1609 comedy Epicene (Works 561).

These, of course, included the repulsive, epicene Lindsey Graham.

Sue has been criticized severely for being emotionally sterile; who is 'even cruel in a refined way her deliberate epicene" frigidity having killed one man before the novel even starts' (Alvarez 118).

Vasquez MG (2003) Epicene rhetoric and reform: Gender and genre in Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Francis attracted plenty of bets but the royals surely would have flinched from an epicene name (it sounds as though it could be male or female).

Much of the initial writing, predicted Summers (two years before the publication of Mother I'm Rooted), 'will necessarily be a ritual breaking of taboos', creating the conditions for a 'more epicene culture' (1973 4-11).