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Thread: Word Of The Day

  1. #841
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    Apr 2009
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    DOSS verb (dos)

    verb
    1. Chiefly British. to sleep or lie down in any convenient place.

    noun
    1. Chiefly British. a place to sleep, especially in a cheap lodging house.
    2. Chiefly British. sleep.


    Quotes

    ... he was too old to doss on furniture night after night.
--*Coleen Nolan,*Envy, 2010


    I didn't want a place to doss down.
--*Jonathan Gash,*The Gondola Scam, 1984



    Origin

    The origin of the English verb doss is obscure. It is most likely derived from the Latin noun dossum, a variant of dorsum “the back (of the body),” a noun of unclear origin. The verb endorse comes from Medieval Latin indorsāre “to write on or sign the back of a document”; the adjective dorsal “having a back or located on the back” is most likely familiar as an anatomical term, especially referring to the fin of a shark or a dolphin. Doss entered English in the late 18th century.

  2. #842
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    ATAVISM noun (at-uh-viz-uhm)

    noun
    1. reversion to an earlier type; throwback.
    2. Biology. a. the reappearance in an individual of characteristics of some remote ancestor that have been absent in intervening generations. b. an individual embodying such a reversion.


    Quotes

    So much of their business was done via e-mail that the phone was almost unnecessary--a sort of quaint atavism that nobody thought to use first--but this morning the ringing had been ceaseless.
--*Debra Ginsberg,*What the Heart Remembers, 2012


    Because the United States has proved successful in absorbing people from so many different backgrounds, the American political elite has, since the mid-20th century at least, tended to look on group identity as a kind of irrational atavism.
--*Park MacDougald,*"Can America's Two Tribes Learn to Live Together?" New York, April 19, 2018



    Origin

    The Latin noun behind the English noun atavism is atavus “great-great-great grandfather; ancestor.” Atavus is formed from atta “daddy,” a nursery word widespread in Indo-European languages, e.g., Greek átta “daddy,” and the possibly Gothic proper name Attila “little father, daddy.” The second element, avus “(maternal) grandfather,” also has cognates in other Indo-European languages, e.g., Old Prussian (an extinct Baltic language related to Latvian and Lithuanian) awis “uncle,” and, very familiar in English, those Scottish and Irish surnames beginning with “O’,” e.g., O’Connor “descended from Connor”). The Celtic “O’” comes from Irish ó “grandson,” from early Irish aue, and appearing as avi “descendant of” in ogham (an alphabet used in archaic Irish inscriptions from about the 5th century). Atavism entered English in the 19th century.

  3. #843
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    BENEDICT noun (ben-I-dikt)

    noun


    a newly married man, especially one who has been long a bachelor.
    Citations


    It had, when I first went to town, just become the fashion for young men of fortune to keep house, and to give their bachelor establishments the importance hitherto reserved for the household of a Benedict.
    -- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Devereux , 1829


    "Why are you so anxious for all England to be informed that you are a Benedict ?" I enquired scornfully.
    -- Alan Dale, A Marriage Below Zero , 1889
    Last edited by Altobelli; 25-06-2018 at 11:06 PM.

  4. #844
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    FLEXITATRIAN noun (flek-si-tair-ee-uhn)

    noun


    a person whose diet is mostly vegetarian but sometimes includes meat, fish, or poultry.
    adjective


    of or relating to flexitarians or their diet: a flexitarian cookbook.
    Citations


    A flexitarian is someone who rarely, though occasionally, consumes meat, including red meat, poultry, and seafood. A climatarian is someone who eats less meat—especially the most energy-consuming meats, like beef and lamb—specifically for environmental reasons.
    -- Brian Kateman, "Beyond 'Vegetarian'," Atlantic , March 14, 2016


    The moderate, conscious eater—the flexitarian —knows where the goal lies: a diet that’s higher in plants and lower in both animal products and hyperprocessed foods, the stuff that makes up something like three-quarters of what’s sold in supermarkets.
    -- Mark Bittman, "Healthy, Meet Delicious," New York Times , April 23, 2013

  5. #845
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    TRANMUNDANE adjective (trans-muhn-deyn)

    adjective

    reaching beyond or existing outside the physical or visible world.
    Citations

    Below me along the lifelines I was aware of many sailors joining in these observations, gazing dumbstruck at it as something transmundane.
    -- William Brinkley, The Last Ship , 1988...

    a common labourer and a travelling tinker had propounded and discussed one of the most ancient theories of transmundane dominion and influence on mundane affairs.
    -- George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel , 1859

  6. #846
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    FAROUCHE adjective (fa-roosh)

    adjective

    French. sullenly unsociable or shy.
    French. fierce.
    Citations

    He's a bit farouche , but I like the way he enthuses about what interests him. It's not put on.
    -- Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero , 1929

    Many of the women in these stories are farouche --they're outsiders, they're troubled, they lack polish, they dream too much.
    -- Joy Williams, "Introducion" Fantastic Women: 18 tales of the surreal and the sublime from Tin House , 2011

  7. #847
    EPEOLATRY

    Similar to idolatry and iconodulism, epeolatry literally means the worship of words. It derives from ἔπος (épos), which unlike λόγος (lógos) more specifically means word in Greek, and was apparently coined in 1860 by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  8. #848
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    BUTTERY adjective (buht-uh-ree)

    adjective

    grossly flattering; smarmy.
    like, containing, or spread with butter.
    resembling butter, as in smoothness or softness of texture: a vest of buttery leather.
    Citations

    Once Maloney began speaking there seemed no end to the words that poured from his whiskered lips, buttery words, words unreliable, words from which all sincerity had been drained to be replaced by a jovial condescension.
    -- Ralph McInerny, Celt and Pepper , 2002

    His face adorned by a seraphic, buttery smile, he stood unmoved, while Miss Higglesby-Browne uttered cyclonic exhortations and reproaches ...
    -- Camilla E. L. Kenyon, "Spanish Doubloons," Sunset: The Pacific Monthly , March 1918

  9. #849
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    MIND-POP noun (mahynd-pop)

    noun

    Psychology Informal. a word, phrase, image, or sound that comes into the mind suddenly and involuntarily and is usually related to a recent experience.
    Citations

    Mind-pops are more often words or phrases than images or sounds and they usually happen when someone is in the middle of a habitual activity that does not demand much concentration—perhaps when they are brushing their teeth or tying their shoes.
    -- Ferris Jabr, "Mind-Pops: Psychologists Begin to Study an Unusual form of Proustian Memory," Scientific American , May 23, 2012...

    researchers can now see that having a mind pop activates the same region of the brain that's engaged when you're open to experience. ... Even when they are mixed and conflicted, they are signs of your creative brain in action.
    -- Srini Pillay, Tinker Dabble Try , 2017

  10. #850
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    KAFKAESQUE adjective (kahf-kuh-esk)

    adjective

    marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies.
    of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling the literary work of Franz Kafka: the Kafkaesque terror of the endless interrogations.
    Citations

    As I see it, there is still another telling Kafkaesque dimension to Watergate now that President Ford has written his version of The End. It is the enormousness of the frustration that has taken hold in America ever since Compassionate Sunday, the sense of waste, futility, and hopelessness that now attaches to the monumental efforts that had been required just to begin to get at the truth.
    -- Philip Roth, "Our Castle," Reading Myself and Others , 1975

    What makes the situation positively Kafkaesque is that under the terms of the Consent Decree, which was created in part to prevent songwriters from monopolizing the market, composers are now often compelled to license their songs to these monopolistic behemoths at absurdly low rates.
    -- John Seabrook, "Will Streaming Music Kill Songwriting?" The New Yorker , February 8, 2016

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