underneathness

English

Etymology

underneath +‎ -ness

Noun

underneathness (uncountable)

1. The quality of being underneath.
   • 2000, Richard J. Schneider, Thoreau's sense of place: essays in American environmental writing, page 159:

     While seeing at last beneath the surface of things, he sees that underneathness is not so much a system as a unity. He does glimpse the system: what he sees is the trace of a process, and that process is a system at work.

2. A space (literal or figurative) that is underneath.
   • 1944, Emily Carr, “Basement”, in The House of All Sorts‎^[1]:

     A house’s underneathness is crushing—weight of sleep pressing from the flats above, little lumps of coal releasing miniature avalanches which rattle down the black pile, furnace grimly dead, asbestos-covered arms prying into every corner.

   • 1973, Edward Wellen, “Chalk Talk,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1973, p. 52, reprinted in The 21st Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 25 Stories by Edward Weller, Wildside Press, 2015,^[2]

     But below the surface are the reelings and writhings that make the floor of a Freudian jungle a lively place. Dr. Chomsky calls this underneathness, this grimmer grammar, the ‘deep structure.’