Word Of The Day

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FANTODS noun (fan-tods)

noun
1. a state of extreme nervousness or restlessness; the willies; the fidgets (usually preceded by the): We all developed the fantods when the plane was late in arriving.


Quotes

It gave me the fantods to discover myself cooped up in that narrow room with such a ghastly figure beside me, which I'll describe to you as best I can.
--*Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616),*The Dialogue of the Dogs, translated by David Kipen, 2008



What would Mr. Gorey make of his status as an All Hallows’ Eve grand ghoul were he alive to see it?
“That would have given Gorey himself the fantods,” said*Mark Dery, using one of the antiquated words the artist loved to collect and trot out in his books.


--*Steven Kurutz,*"Edward Gorey Was Eerily Prescient," New York Times, October 30, 2018



Origin

In chapter eight of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*(1884), Huck, hiding on Jackson’s Island, spots a man sleeping on the ground: “It most give me the fantods.” Here the meaning of fantods is plain enough: "acute distress, fear, panic"; the meanings of fantods range between irritability, tension, an emotional fit or outburst, and physical or mental disorder—not at all specific. Fantods has no reliable etymology: it may be a jocular formation based on fantasy or fantastic. Fantods entered English in the 19th century.

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VIATOR noun (vahy-ey-tawr)

noun
1. a wayfarer; traveler.


Quotes

... how long he was a viator or traveler in his course of obedience no man knows.
--*Samuel Rutherford,**The Covenant of Life Opened,*1654


... these are so graciously concealed by the fine trees of their grounds, that the passing viator remains unappalled by them ...
--*John Ruskin,*Fors Clavigera, 1875



Origin

Viator comes straight from Latin viātor “traveler,” formed from the noun via “track, road” and the noun suffix -tor signifying agency. Many occurrences of viātor are on epitaphs on Roman tombs from the “occupant,” asking travelers passing by not to deface the tomb with graffiti, or warning, “Look out! Your turn is coming!” Viātor was also a title of Mercury, the patron and protector of travelers and the escort of the dead to the underworld. A viātor was also an agent employed on official errands for magistrates, other public officers, and professional organizations. Viator entered English in the early 16th century.

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GREEN - EYED adjective (green-ahyd)

adjective
1. jealous; envious; distrustful.


Quotes

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock / the meat it feeds on ...
--*William Shakespeare,*Othello, 1623


The protagonist, Ida, has a green-eyed prettiness ...
--*Maria Russo,*"In Praise of Maurice Sendak," New York Times, February 14, 2019



Origin

Green-eyed means "jealous" and is probably most familiar from Shakespeare’s phrase green-eyed monster (Othello, 1604). In the ancient and medieval humoral theory, an excess of yellow bile, which was thought to give the skin a greenish tint, was associated with the element fire and produced a violent, short-tempered, vengeful character. Green-eyed in its literal sense entered English in the 16th century.

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BRACKETOLOGY noun (brak-i-tol-uh-jee)

noun
1. a system of diagrammatically predicting and tracking the process of elimination among sequentially paired opponents in a tournament, especially an NCAA basketball tournament.


Quotes

Bracketology—the scientific-sounding name*for prognosticating tournament picks before the official committee reveals the bracket on Selection Sunday—has exploded among basketball fans in recent years ....
--*Zach Schonbrun,*"To N.C.A.A. Bracketologists, It’s Who’s In, Not Who Wins," New York Times,*March 13, 2018


Bracketology is the practice of predicting the field and seeding for all 68 teams in the NCAA tournament and/or the outcomes for all games in the tournament. It is a made-up "-ology", sadly, so don't change your major just yet.
--*Daniel Wilco,*"March Madness bracketology: The ultimate guide," NCAA, March 12, 2019



Origin

Bracketology combines bracket, in the sports sense of “a diagram for tracking advancement in a tournament,” and -ology, a word-forming element indicating “branch of knowledge, science.” The term playfully elevates the sports pastime to a discipline or science. Stages of sports tournaments have been termed brackets since the early 1900s, from bracket as a “grouping” in the late 1800s, a sense informed by pairs of typographical brackets for enclosing text or numbers. The tree-diagram structure of NCAA basketball tournament brackets indeed calls up such typographical brackets, named after the original architectural bracket, a type of L-shaped support projecting from a wall. Entering English in the 16th century, the word bracket may derive from a Romance word meaning “breeches,” the architectural devices perhaps resembling a pair of legs or the codpieces historically worn on breeches. That could make bracketology, with a liberal literalism, "the study of pants” or “the study of jockstraps.”

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OBSCURANTISM noun (uhb-skyoor-uhn-tiz-uhm)

noun
1. opposition to the increase and spread of knowledge.


Quotes

New ideologies manipulate religions, push a contagious obscurantism.
--*Emmanuel Macron,*"Commemoration of the Armistice," translated from French, November 11, 2018


There is the obscurantism of the politician and not always of the more ignorant sort, who would reject every idea which is not of immediate service to his cause.
--*Y. B. Yeats,*"The Irish National Theatre and Three Sorts of Ignorance," The United Irishman, October 24, 1903



Origin

English obscurantism ultimately comes via the French noun obscurantisme from Latin obscūrant-, the stem of obscūrāns, present participle of obscūrāre “to dim, cover in darkness,” a derivative of the adjective obscūrus "dim, dark, dingy; insignificant, doubtful," the obvious source of English obscure. Obscūrus is a compound of the preposition and prefix ob, ob- “to, toward, in front of“ (and in compounds usually having a sense of confrontation or opposition), and the unattested adjective scūrus. Scūrus is a Latin development of the Proto-Indo-European root (s)keu-, (s)kū- “to hide, cover.” The Germanic form of this root, skeu-, has a derivative noun skeujam “cloud, cloud cover” that becomes skȳ in Old Norse, adopted into English as sky. Obscurantism entered English in the 19th century.

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WELLSPRING noun (wel-spring)

noun
1. a source or supply of anything, especially when considered inexhaustible: a wellspring of affection.


Quotes

I decided to reach deep down, to the wellspring of my charisma, which had been too long undisturbed, and dip my fingers in it and flick it liturgically over the audience.
--*Steve Martin,*The Pleasure of My Company, 2003


And from the same wellspring of creativity, utilizing that same power to abstract, they were the first people to see the world around them in symbolic form, to extract its essence and reproduce it.
--*Jean M. Auel,*The Plains of Passage, 1990



Origin

Wellspring from its earliest records has meant both “source or headspring of a river or stream” as well as “source of a constant supply of something.” The extended, metaphorical sense appears earlier, in the Old English version of the Cura Pastoralis (Pastoral Care) of St. Gregory the Great (a.d. c540-604) that was commissioned by King Alfred the Great (a.d. 849-899). The literal sense of wellspring, “source of a stream or river,” first appears in the Catholic Homilies (c990) composed by Aelfric “Grammaticus” (c955-c1025).

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PALIMPSEST noun (pal-imp-sest)

noun
1. a parchment or the like from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make room for another text.


Quotes

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
--*George Orwell,*Nine**** Eighty-Four, 1949


Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening, he engaged with a powerful lens deciphering the remains of the original inscription upon a palimpsest, I deep in a recent treatise upon surgery.
--*Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,*"The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez," The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905



Origin

English palimpsest comes via Latin palimpsēstus from Greek palímpsēstos “rubbed again, scraped again,” i.e., in reference to durable parchment (not papyrus) “erased (so as to be able to be written upon) again.” Palimpsests are important in recovering the texts of ancient manuscripts. At least two unique ancient texts have been recovered through modern techniques of decipherment: the first text is Cicero’s dialogue De Re Publica (“On the Republic, On the Commonwealth”), which was discovered in the Vatican Library in 1819 and published definitively in 1908. The second major find is the Archimedes Palimpsest, containing seven treatises by the Greek scientist and mathematician Archimedes (c287-212 b.c.), which was made legible after decipherment performed between 1998 and 2008. Palimpsest entered English in the 17th century.

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EARTHSHAKING adjective (urth-shey-king)

adjective
1. imperiling, challenging, or affecting basic beliefs, attitudes, relationships, etc.


Quotes

... not everything true is universally comprehensible. And that, small as it is, is an earthshaking insight.
--*Jesse Green,*"Review: 'An Ordinary Muslim' Gets Caught Between Cultures and Genres," New York Times, February 26, 2018


Divorce is hardly an earthshaking event in politics these days.
--*Hank Phillippi Ryan,*The Other Woman, 2012



Origin

Earthshaking in its literal sense was modeled on epithets for the Greek god Poseidon (he caused earthquakes) and the Latin god Neptune. Ennosígaios and Ennosíchthōn, both meaning "earthshaker," were epithets for Poseidon in the Iliad and Odyssey. Latin Ennosigaeus is a pretty unimaginative borrowing. Earthshaking entered English toward the end of the 16th century; its usual sense "of great consequence or importance" dates from the 19th century.

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PLUMBEOUS adjective (pluhm-bee-uhs)

adjective
1. resembling or containing lead; leaden.


Quotes

... a headachy dawn was breaking, with small rain sifting down out of clouds that were the same plumbeous colour as the shadows under Baby's eyes.
--*John Banville,*The Untouchable, 1997


... the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to a plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood.
--*Vladimir Nabokov,**Transparent Things, 1972



Origin

Plumbeous comes straight from the Latin adjective plumbeus “made of lead, leaden, (of coins) base,” a derivative of the noun plumbum. Plumbum is a noun of unknown etymology, and linguists have speculated on the connection between plumbum and Greek mólybdos with its variants mólibos and bólimos, which also have no reliable etymology. In ancient times lead was mined in Attica (i.e., the territory whose capital was Athens), Macedonia, Asia Minor (Anatolia), Etruria, Sardinia, Gaul (France), Britain, and Spain. Many scholars think that the Greek and Latin words derive from an Iberian (Spanish) language, and the Basque word for lead, berun, supports this. Plumbeous entered English in the 16th century.

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ISOLATO noun (ahy-suh-ley-toh)

noun
1. a person who is physically or spiritually isolated from their times or society.


Quotes

... my life has been that of an isolato, a shepherd on a mountaintop, situated as far from so-called civilization as possible, and it has made me unnaturally brusque and awkward.
--*Russell Banks,*Cloudsplitter, 1998


I’m an isolato now and there’s no going back.
--*Viv Albertine,*"Viv Albertine: 'I set out to write about an unpleasant woman who fantasised about murder. It turned out to be me,'" The Guardian,*April 13, 2018



Origin

The rare English noun isolato comes directly from the Italian adjective and noun isolato “isolated; an isolated person.” The Italian word is the past participle of the verb isolare “to shut off, cut off, isolate,” a derivative of the noun isola “isle, island” (there is no Latin verb īnsulāre). Isola is a regular Italian development of Latin īnsula, a noun of unknown etymology, meaning “island, an island as a place of exile, tenement house,” all of which can be pretty bleak. Isolato entered English in the mid-19th century.