English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.
Roy Blount, Jr.

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.
Rudy Rucker

Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.
Bishop Robert South

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.
Edmund Burke