word of the day: sylph

The word of the day is sylph:

1. a slender, graceful woman or girl.

2. (in folklore) one of a race of supernatural beings supposed to inhabit the air.

Origin

< Neo-Latin sylphēs (plural), coined by Paracelsus; apparently blend of sylva (variant spelling of Latin silva forest) and Greek nýmphē (dictionary.com) 

"Raving mad though I am about most of Max Vulpino's work, I think that in his ballet Torn Wings and Faux Pas he's gone too far - with sylphs squawking like a gaggle of goosed Valley Girls and ostriches of a certain age on point and attempting entrechats."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness: A Dictionarrative

word of the day: balustrade

The word of the day is balustrade:

a railing with supporting balusters (dictionary.com),

which brings us to baluster:

 

1. any of a number of closely spaced supports for a railing.

2. balusters, a balustrade.

3. any of various symmetrical supports, as furniture legs or spindles, tending to swell toward the bottom or top.

< French, Middle French balustre < Italian balaustro pillar shaped like the calyx of the pomegranate flower, ultimately < Latin balaustium < Greek balaústion pomegranate flower (dictionary.com) 

"I sent him letters every day begging him to keep his distance - for his own safety as well as mine - although I secretly hoped, even expected, to find him hanging from my balustrade when I returned from my Serbo-Croat lessons with my consonants in distress....

"The rupture of relations between Torquil and Jonquil was far from amicable.  Torquil stalked her on the boulevards, burned Eastern crosses on her balustrade, bombed her mailbox with incendiary marzipan, invaded her E-mail with insinuations and pseudonyms, and crashed her farewell party in an asbestos cat-suit sporting a battery-operated lashing tail with which he thrashed Jonquil before a roomful of incredulous guests."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness: A Dictionarrative

word of the day: saturnine

The word of the day is saturnine:

1. sluggish in temperament; gloomy; taciturn.

2. suffering from lead poisoning, as a person.

3. due to absorption of lead, as bodily disorders.

< Medieval Latin sāturnīnus (dictionary.com)

"Jonquil adapted to the privations and rigors of Trajikistan's inns with grinning equanimity before discovering an auberge on the side of the road to the Fissures of Fingblat, just past the three crags known as the Saturnine Yet Oversexed Sisters, whence no comely youth ever returns."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness: A Dictionarrative

word of the day: pfeffernuss

The word of the day is pfeffernuss:

a small hard highly spiced cookie made traditionally for the Christmas holidays (merriam-webster.com)

"To complement the fig, pistachio, and finocchio caprice, the chef whipped up an acidulous splash of hazelnut oil, oxalis, and lime juice, with a pinch of powdered pfeffernuss."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness: A Dictionarrative

word of the day: oxalis

The word of the day is oxalis:

any plant of the genus Oxalis, comprising the wood sorrels.

< Latin: garden sorrel, sour wine < Greek oxalís, derivative of oxýs sharp (dictionary.com)

"To complement the fig, pistachio, and finocchio caprice, the chef whipped up an acidulous splash of hazelnut oil, oxalis, and lime juice, with a pinch of powdered pfeffernuss."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness: A Dictionarrative

word of the day: finocchio

The word of the day is finocchio:

Florence fennel.  (dictionary.com)

"To complement the fig, pistachio, and finocchio caprice, the chef whipped up an acidulous splash of hazelnut oil, oxalis, and lime juice, with a pinch of powdered pfeffernuss."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness: A Dictionarrative

word of the day: asseverate

The word of the day is asseverate:

to declare earnestly or solemnly; affirm positively; aver.

< Latin assevērātus spoken in earnest (dictionary.com)


"An acidulous tone had crept into both sides of the conversation, her site with balsamic asseverations and cloying evasions, his with a bite of horseradish astride a malt vinegar redolent of London fogs, fish and chips, and tabloid treacle and gossip (it was, in fact, revolting)."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness: A Dictionarrative

word of the day: taiga

The word of the day is taiga:

the coniferous evergreen forests of subarctic lands, covering vast areas of northern North America and Eurasia.

< Russian taĭgá (dictionary.com)

 

 

"You may come upon a question mark in the most intimate places - midsentence, for instance, and with others of its kind, ganging up on some innocent situation and interrogating it to death.  Sprinkling question marks so liberally within a sentence, with no capital letters to make you think you've left it, emphasizes or mimics the thought process where such a series is appropriate....

 

Is the taiga everything you were hoping for?  Is it pure? distant? sublime?  Are the musk oxen still in their winter coats?  Are they talking to themselves? to the BBC audiences? to us?"

 

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence 

word of the day: espadrille

The word of the day is espadrille:

1. a flat shoe with a cloth upper, a rope sole, and sometimes lacing that ties around the ankle.

2. a casual shoe resembling this, often with a wedge heel instead of a flat sole. (dictionary.com)

"Question marks help speculations chime away in the reader's mind, echoing your own.

Why couldn't she breeze into a room and kick off her espadrilles like other girls?"

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence 

word of the day: marmoreal

The word of the day is marmoreal:

 

skin of marmoreal smoothness.

< Latin marmore (us) made of marble (dictionary.com)

"Indirect object:....

 

 She gave him the cold shoulder because they had a marmoreal love."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire

word of the day: vacuity

The word of the day is vacuity:

1. the state of being vacuous or without contents; vacancy; emptiness

2. absence of thought or intelligence; inanity; blankness

3. a time or state of dullness, lacking in mental or physical action or productivity

4. an empty space; void

5. absence or lack of something specified

6. something inane, senseless, or stupid

7. a vacuum (dictionary.com)

"Coordinate conjunctions join words, phrases, and clauses that are of equal importance or of the same grammatical structure within a sentence.  The most common coordinate conjunctions are and, but, for, or, neither, nor, and yet...

"Neither his existence nor his vacuity betrayed his true intent."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed

word of the day: demotic

The word of the day is demotic:

1. of or pertaining to the ordinary, everyday, current form of a language; vernacular:

a poet with a keen ear for demotic rhythms.

2. of or pertaining to the common people; popular.

3. of, pertaining to, or noting the simplified form of hieratic writing used in ancient Egypt between 700 b.c. and a.d. 500.

Greek dēmotikós popular, plebeian, equivalent to dēmót (ēs) a plebeian 

(dictionary.com)

"Using a demotic word like boogie precludes formal adherence to rules, except for comically incongruous effect:

"There wasn't a single item in my close that I could don with impunity, nor was there a shoe in which it would be seemly to boogie...

"Demotically speaking, we take our liberties.  How often do you expect to hear 'Whom do you think you're kidding?'?  Here again, it's the first word in the sentence - isn't that enough to give it at least a quasi-subject status?  But whom is (or is not) being kidded, and is the object (however the wide of the mark) whom someone is rhetorically failing to fool.  Still, with all those boggled attempts, we begrudge the subject its total dominion over the nominative case.  And maybe if someone's being kidded, or not, he/she has in the process acquired immunity to the prescribed case - and can go on to the next challenge: Who(m) do you think you are, anyway?"

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed

word of the day: Procrustean

The word of the day is Procrustean:

in figurative sense, "violently making conformable to standard," from Procrustes, mythical robber of Attica who seized travelers, tied them to his bed, and either stretched their limbs or lopped of their legs to make them fit it. The name is Greek Prokroustes "one who stretches," from prokrouein "to beat out, stretch out" (dictionary.com)


"Unlike so many grammarians who have made their specialty abhorrent to us, words are more Protean than Procrustean.  Supple, flirtatious, acrobatic, they change form to play with one another in myriad combinations, manifold meanings...

"Procrustean grammatical etiquette admonishes us not to end sentences with prepositions.  Certain verbs, however, travel around with prepositions familiarly attached to them - cuddle up, finish off, shut up, shut off, chime in, make out, turn on, come to - and protect their familiars' right to be there.

"There wasn't a single item in my closet that I could don with impunity, nor was there a shoe fit to boogie in."

 - Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed

word of the day: rattan

The word of the day is rattan:

1. Also called rattan palm. any of various climbing palms of the genus Calamus or allied genera.

2. the tough stems of such palms, used for wickerwork, canes, etc.

3. a stick or switch of this material. (dictionary.com)

 

 

"I did most of my reading as a child on my bed or on a rattan sofa in the sunroom of the house I grew up in.  Here's a strange thing: Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them."

 

 - Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck 

word of the day: papadum

The word of the day is papadum:

an Indian flatbread made of lentil flour, often topped with chutney or various dips or salsas (dictionary.com)

"When I had people to dinner, I loved to serve Michael's complicated recipe for chicken curry, accompanied by condiments and pappadums - although I sometimes served instead a marginally simpler Craig Claiborne recipe for lamb curry that had appeared in Craig's Sunday column in The New York Times.  There were bananas in it, and heavy cream.  I made it recently and it was horrible."

 - Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck 

word of the day: hagiography

The word of the day is hagiography:

the writing and critical study of the lives of the saints (dictionary.com)


"More generally, high valuation on land has translated into Australians'  embracing rural agricultural values justified by their British background but not justified by Australia's low agricultural productivity.  Those rural values continue to pose an obstacle to solving one of modern Australia's built-in political problems: the often disproportionate influence of rural voters.  In the Australian mystique even more than in Europe and the U.S., rural people are considered honest, and city-dwellers are considered dishonest.  If a farmer goes bankrupt, it's assumed to be the misfortune of a virtuous person overcome by forces beyond his control (such as a drought), while a city-dweller who goes bankrupt is assumed to have brought it on himself through dishonesty.  This rural hagiography and disproportionately strong rural vote ignore the already-mentioned reality that Australia is the most highly urbanized nation.  They have contributed to the government's long-continued perverse support for measures mining rather than sustaining the environment, such as land clearance and indirect subsidies of uneconomic rural areas."

 - Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

word of the day: eutrophication

The word of the day is eutrophication:

Ecology. (of a lake) characterized by an abundant accumulation of nutrients that support a dense growth of algae and other organisms, the decay of which depletes the shallow waters of oxygen in summer. (dictionary.com)

 

 

"Behind those impressive statistics on the scale and growth of China's economy lurks the fact that much of it is based on outdated, inefficient, or polluting technology.  China's energy efficiency in industrial production is only half that of the First World; its paper production consumes more than twice as much water as in the First World; and its irrigation relies on inefficient surface methods responsible for water wastage, soil nutrient losses, eutrophication, and river sediment loads."

 

 - Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed 

word of the day: relict

The word of the day is relict:

noun

1. Ecology. a species or community living in an environment that has changed from that which is typical for it.

2. a remnant or survivor.

3. a widow.

< Medieval Latin relicta widow, noun use of feminine of Latin relictus, past participle of relinquere to relinquish (dictionary.com) 

 

 

"Charcoal, piles of stones, and relict stands of crop plants showed that the northeast part of the island had been burned and laboriously converted to garden patches where crops could be planted in natural pockets of soil, extended by piling surface stones into mounds."

 

 - Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed