Word Of The Day

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BUZZWIG noun (buhz-wig)

noun
1. a person of consequence.
2. a large, bushy wig.
3. a person wearing such a wig.


Quotes

... all was suddenly upset by two witnesses ... whom the old Spanish buzwigs doated on as models of all that could be looked for in the best.
--*Thomas De Quincey,*"The Spanish Nun," Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, Volume I, 1853


who, as Porson's brother-in-law, and a man of admirable sense and wit, had a no profound veneration for the buzzwig doctor.
--*Mary Russell Mitford,*"Letter to Miss Barrett, July 23, 1842," The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, 1870



Origin

A buzzwig “bigwig, big shot” is someone who wears a large, bushy wig. The first syllable, buzz, may be a shortening of busby, the very large fur hat worn by hussars on parade. Buzzwig entered English in the 19th century.

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LIPOGRAM noun (lip-uh-gram)

noun
1. a written work composed of words chosen so as to avoid the use of one or more specific alphabetic characters.


Quotes

He was translating into English the brilliant novel by Georges Perec, “La Disparition” – a lipogram written entirely without the letter “e.”
--*Andy Martin,*"The Treachery of Translators," New York Times, January 28, 2013


We received some short autobiographies and there was an oddly large number of lipograms about pirates.
--*"Contestant Lipograms: the Best of the Best," NPR, June 29, 2012



Origin

Lipogram looks as if it means “weighing or measuring of fat in grams or kilograms,” i.e., a medical procedure performed after a liposuction. Wrong, wrong wrong! The lipo- in liposuction comes from the Greek noun lípos “(animal) fat, lard,” from the Proto-Indo-European root leip-, lip- “fat; to stick,” from which English derives liver (the organ). A lipogram really is a kind of literary composition (usually a poem) in which the author deliberately avoids using a sound, a letter, or a digraph, e.g., s, r, or th. Lipogram comes from the Greek adjective lipográmmatos “missing a letter,” from the Greek root leip-, loip-, lip- “to leave, leave behind.” Greek leip-, loip-, lip- is the regular development of the Proto-Indo-European root leikw-, loikw-, likw-, which appears with a nasal infix (-n-) in Latin linquere, relinquere “to leave, quit, depart.” The combining form -grámmatos is a derivative of gráphein “to write” from the Proto-Indo-European root gerbh- “to scratch,” the source of English carve. Lipogram entered English in the 18th century.

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SASHAY verb (sa-shey)

verb
1. Informal. to glide, move, or proceed easily or nonchalantly: She just sashayed in as if she owned the place.
2. Informal. to chassé in dancing.


Quotes

... the barman had been of the opinion that the whole karaoke evening was going to be an utter bust; but then the little old man had sashayed into the room ...
--*Neil Gaiman,*Anansi Boys, 2005


She too had endured some hard times and she too could sashay in a housecoat.
--*Alan Cumming,*"Introduction," to Goodbye to Berlin, 2012



Origin

Nobody, but nobody, could sashay, “walk nonchalantly,” like Jack Benny across the front of a stage. Sashay is an Americanism, a metathetic variant (or mispronunciation if one prefers) of chassé, the French term for a gliding step performed in a quadrille or square dancing. (Chassé is the past participle of chasser “to chase.”) Sashay entered English in the 19th century.

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OILLIONAIRE noun (oil-yuh-nair)

noun
1. Canadian Informal. a millionaire whose wealth is derived from the petroleum industry.


Quotes

Robert Q. Lewis wonders if everyone has heard about the Texas oillionaire who put in well-to-well carpeting.
--*Hal Boyle,*"Mailman Rescues Writer Again," Spokane Daily Chronicle, March 5, 1957


The oil and gas men’s day at the fair this year was an immense success from every viewpoint. It drew everything from the “rough neck” to the “oillionaire,” and it has come as an annual attraction.
--*“Oil and Gas Men Had Day at Louisiana Fair,” The Oil Weekly, November 13, 1920



Origin

It is no surprise that oillionaire, “a millionaire whose wealth is derived from the petroleum industry,” was originally an Americanism, the U.S. having so much petroleum, the U.K. none. The formation of oillionaire is obvious, a blend of oil and millionaire. Oillionaire entered English in the 1920s.

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PLEXUS noun (plek-suhs)



noun
1. any complex structure containing an intricate network of parts: the plexus of international relations.
2. a network, as of nerves or blood vessels.


Quotes

... as he thrust his bold hand into the plexus of the money-market, he was delightedly unaware of how he shook the pillars of existence ...
--*Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne,*The Wrecker, 1891


... wearing jeans and a loose flannel shirt revealing a dark plexus of tattoos on his chest and arms, Rosenberg intently fielded questions about “Confessions of the Fox.”
--*Peter Haldeman,*"The Coming of Age in Transgender Literature," New York Times, October 24, 2018



Origin

Plexus is a straightforward borrowing of Latin plexus “twining, braid, plaiting,” a very rare noun that appears first (and only) in the Roman poet and astrologer Marcus Manilius (1st century a.d.), who wrote a long, tedious poem on astronomy. Plexus is a derivative of the verb plectere “to twine, plait,” from the Proto-Indo-European root plek, plok- “to braid, plait,” from which Greek derives plékein “to twine, plait” and plokḗ “a twining, twisting.” The root plek-, plok- regularly becomes fleh-, flah- in Germanic, which, with the addition of the suffix -s, becomes fleax in Old English (English flax). Plexus entered English in the 17th century.

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SYNECDOCHE noun (si-nek-duh-kee)

noun
1. Rhetoric. a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, as in ten sail for ten ships or a Croesus for a rich man.


Quotes

... our current cultural circumstance, for which the internet stands as synecdoche, makes us belatedly ache with a longing for a lost coherence.
--*Michael Joyce,*"The Persistence of the Ordinary," Moral Tales and Meditations, 2001


In this way, the trumpet is a kind of synecdoche for Chance’s ramplike gift: in the course of a verse, a song, or, here, the ecstatic whole of an album, he always seems to be stretching toward something new, something else.
--*Vinson Cunningham,*"The Sound of Hope: Chance the Rapper," The New Yorker, May 24, 2016



Origin

Synecdoche, “a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special,” comes via Latin synecdochē, from Greek synekdochḗ “understanding one thing through another.” The funny thing is that the word first appears in the works of the great, commonsensical Roman rhetorician Quintilian (c35-c95 a.d.). The formation of synecdoche is simple enough: the Greek preposition and prefix syn, syn- is well known in English; the noun ekdochḗ “receiving from another in succession” later acquires the meaning “interpretation.” Synecdoche first appears in English in the 15th century.

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BOOTSTRAP verb (boot-strap)

verb
1. to help (oneself) without the aid of others: She spent years bootstrapping herself through college.
2. Computers. boot (defs 24, 28).

noun
1. a loop of leather or cloth sewn at the top rear, or sometimes on each side, of a boot to facilitate pulling it on.
2. a means of advancing oneself or accomplishing something: He used his business experience as a bootstrap to win voters.
adjective
1. relying entirely on one's efforts and resources: The business was a bootstrap operation for the first ten years.
2. self-generating or self-sustaining: a bootstrap process.

Idioms
1. pull (oneself) up by (one's) bootstraps, to help oneself without the aid of others; use one's resources: I admire him for pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.


Quotes

From very humble beginnings, he bootstrapped himself into becoming an excellent trial lawyer.
--*Karl Friedman,*The Professor, 2000


He bootstrapped himself during and after the war from woodworker at the bench to foreman, work superintendent, dispatcher, planner, and head of several technical bureaus at Sevuraltyazhstroi.
--*Timothy J. Colton,*Yeltsin: A Life, 2008



Origin

Bootstrap, originally spelled boot-strap, entered English in its literal sense in the second half of the 19th century. By about 1900 the idiom “to pull (oneself) up by (one's) bootstraps” was used to exemplify an impossible task, i.e., “Why can’t a man stand up by pulling on his bootstraps?”. By 1916 the idiom had also acquired the meaning “to better oneself by rigorous, unaided effort.” In the mid-20th century, bootstrap acquired the technical meaning "a fixed sequence of instructions for loading the operating system of a computer," i.e., the program loaded first would pull itself (and the others) up by the bootstrap, from a somewhat earlier usage in the mid-1940s in reference to electrical circuits.

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GIBBLE-GABBLE noun (gib-uhl-gab-uhl)

noun
1. senseless chatter.

verb
1. to engage in gibble-gabble


Quotes

They were always yapping at each other in some outlandish gibble-gabble.
--*George R. R. Martin,*Fevre Dream, 1982


My friend, I can't understand that gibble-gabble.
--*François Rabelais,*Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1532, translated by M. A. Screech, 2006



Origin

There is not much to say about gibble-gabble: it is usually explained as a reduplication of gabble with a variation of the vowel, except that the noun gabble appears in print in 1602, two years after gibble-gabble (the verb gabble first appears in print in the late 16th century).

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SIRENIC adjective (sahy-ren-ik)

adjective
1. melodious,*tempting,*or*alluring.


Quotes

She sang for an hour. I resigned myself to the spell of her voice--not alone to that sirenic power, but to the pleasure of being close beside her.
--*E. W. Olney,*"Mrs. Vanderduynck," The Galaxy, June 1876


Seen in this context, good news of the kind Huffington now seeks to promulgate is a public menace. It’s sirenic, a call to blindness, a “happy” filter placed on a world that is often good but frequently not.
--*Alexander Nazaryan,*"The Bad News About Good News," Newsweek, February 27, 2015



Origin

English Siren (the mythical creature) comes from Greek Seirḗn, which has no reliable etymology. The Sirens first occur in the The Odyssey (book 12); there are only two of them, they are unnamed, and they live on an island yet sit in the middle of a flowery meadow surrounded by the moldering bones of the mortals they have beguiled. What the Sirens tempt Odysseus with is knowledge, irresistible for the curious, restless hero: “We know everything that happened at Troy, what the Argives (Achaeans, Greeks) and Trojans suffered at the will of the gods, and we know everything that happens on the all-nourishing earth.” Homer says nothing about the physical appearance of the Sirens—nothing about birds with the torso and arms of a woman, how many Sirens there were, their names and genealogy, all of which are later additions. The suffix -ic, however, has an excellent etymology: it comes from the Proto-Indo-European adjective suffix -ikos. The Greek form of this suffix is -ik ós, in Latin -icus (-ique in French). English -ic may come from the Greek, Latin, or French forms.

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PROGNOSTICATE verb (prog-nos-ti-keyt)

verb
1. to forecast or predict (something future) from present indications or signs; prophesy.
2. to*foretoken;*presage: birds prognosticating spring.
3. to*make*a*forecast;*prophesy.


Quotes

Indeed, during the year we are describing, it was known that all those visible signs which prognosticate any particular description of weather, had altogether lost their significance.
--*William Carleton,*The Black Prophet: A Tale of Irish Famine, 1847


January is here, which means it’s time to prognosticate about the new year — and specifically, how we in the Bay Area will be eating over the next 12 months and beyond.
--*Sarah Fritsche,*"How the Bay Area will eat in 2019: Convenience, CBD, and more chicken," San Francisco Chronicle, January 4, 2019



Origin

English prognosticate comes from Medieval Latin prognōsticāt-, the inflectional stem of prognōsticātus “foretold, predicted,” the past participle of prognōsticāre. Prognōsticāre comes from the Greek adjective and noun prognōstikós “prescient, foreknowing; a prognostic, a sign of the future.” It is not common for Latin and Greek to agree so easily in their etymologies, but prognosticate is a good example. The basic meaning of the preposition and prefix prō, pro- in both languages means “forward, forth, in front of” and is akin to English for and forth. The root gnō- in Latin and Greek means “to know” and is akin to English know and Slavic (Polish) znać. Prognosticate entered English in the 15th century.