word of the day: chuffed

The word of the day is chuffed:

Etymology:  compare chuff adj.¹, chuff adj.²

slang (orig. Mil.). 

a. Pleased, satisfied. 

b. Displeased, disgruntled. (OED).

"Mary, Julie and Gerald are all gone, but I feel somehow called,' she wrote, 'as humble messenger from Mary, to salute you.  She would have been so chuffed!"

 - Nancy Gordon, as quoted by Daniel Mendelsohn, "The American boy: a famous author, a young reader, and a life-changing correspondence", 7 January 2013 The New Yorker


This appears to be another one of those words, like "sanction" or "cleave", that is its own adjective.

word of the day: importune

The word of the day is importune:

Etymology:  < French importune-r (1512 in Godefroy Compl.) = Italian importunāre (Florio), Spanish importunar (Percivall), medieval Latin importūnārī , -āre , < importūnus : see importune adj. 

1. trans. To burden; to be troublesome or wearisome to; to trouble, worry, pester, annoy. 

2. To press, urge, impel. Also absol. Obs. 

3. To solicit pressingly and persistently; to ply or beset with requests or petitions. 

4. To ask for (a thing) urgently and persistently; to crave or beg for.

5.a. intr. To make urgent solicitation; to be importunate. 

b. To solicit for purposes of prostitution.

6. To import, portend. (A Spenserian misuse.

 (OED)

"I studied hard and absorbed my grammars and didn't confide any of this to Mary Renault.  She had brought me to the Greeks, and had shown me what I was, and it was somehow shaming to let on that I was having a hard time finding anyone like the characters in her novels.  Somewhere in the 'The Persian Boy', when the young Bagoas is being schooled at Susa in the arts of the courtesan, the kindly master who is preparing him for service to the King reminds of a crucial rule of life at court: 'Never be importunate, never, never.'  I was no longer sixteen, and I was determined never to importune her."

 - Daniel Mendelsohn, "The American boy: a famous author, a young reader, and a life-changing correspondence", 7 January 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: marmoreal

The word of the day is marmoreal:

Etymology:  < classical Latin marmoreus (see marmoreous adj.) + -al suffix¹.

literary.

1. Resembling marble or a marble statue; cold (also smooth, white, etc.) like marble.2. Made or composed of marble. Obs. (OED)

"To me, Andrew and Ralph were figures in a vast allegorical conflict.  Under the white banner of Andrew there was Renault, and true love, and the ancient Greeks, with their lofty rhetoric and marmoreal beauty; under the black banner of Ralph there was Playgirl, and sex, and thoughts about naked men - the messy and confusing present."

 - Daniel Mendelsohn, "The American boy: a famous author, a young reader, and a life-changing correspondence", 7 January 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: buckram

The word of the day is buckram:

Etymology:  Found in most of the European languages between 12th and 15th cents...

 

1. A kind of fine linen or cotton fabric. Obs. 

2.a. A kind of coarse linen or cloth stiffened with gum or paste. men in buckram: sometimes proverbially for non-existent persons, in allusion to Falstaff's ‘four rogues in buckram’ (quot. 1598).

b. A lawyer's bag; = buckram-bag n. at Compounds 2. Obs. 

3. fig. Stiffness; a stiff and starched manner; that which gives a man a stiff exterior. 

4.a. Of buckram, like buckram. 

b. fig. Stiff, ‘starched’, ‘stuck up’; that has a false appearance of strength. (OED)

"I remember the day that this teacher handed me the jacketless hardback of 'The Charioteer', with its dark-gray buckram boards."

 - Daniel Mendelsohn, "The American boy: a famous author, a young reader, and a life-changing correspondence", 7 January 2013 The New Yorker

phrase of the day: coals to Newcastle

The phrase of the day is coals to Newcastle:

To do something pointless and superfluous. (phrases.org.uk)


"Patrick O'Brian, the author of 'Master and Commander', was an admirer; he dedicated the fourth Aubrey-Maturin book to her, with an inscription 'An owl to Athens' - the ancient Greek version of 'coals to Newcastle'."

 - Daniel Mendelsohn, "The American boy: a famous author, a young reader, and a life-changing correspondence", 7 January 2013 The New Yorker

Word of the day: emendation

The word of the day is emendation:

Etymology:  < Latin ēmendātiōn-em, noun of action < ēmendāre to emend v.

The action of emending.
1. Correction, reformation, improvement (of life, conduct, etc.). Obs.

2. a. Improvement by alteration and correction; esp. of literary or artistic products, methods of procedure, scientific systems, etc.; a particular instance of such improvement.
b. esp. The correction (usually by conjecture or inference) of the text of an author where it is presumed to have been corrupted in transmission; a textual alteration for this purpose. (OED)

"West's proposed emendations to the texts are couched in the meticulous language of classical scholarship, and take the form of suggestions and proposals; perhaps because Mitchell is not a classicist, he is emboldened to cast West's vision in stone.  His new translation not only deletes passages that West merely brackets or questions but omits even some passages that West thinks were 'expansions' by P himself."

 - Daniel Mendelsohn, "Battle lines: a slimmer, faster Iliad", 7 November 2011 The New Yorker

Word of the day: fillip

The word of the day is fillip:

apparently onomatopoeic; compare flip n.¹, flirt n., used in similar sense. The n. and vb. appear nearly contemporaneously in 16th cent.; it is uncertain which is the source of the other.

1.a. A movement made by bending the last joint of a finger against the thumb and suddenly releasing it (so as to propel some small object, or merely as a gesture); a smart stroke or tap given by this means.

b. Something of small importance; a trifle. Also, a short space of time, a moment.

2. In a wider sense: A smart blow (with the fist, etc.). Now rare. 

3. Something that serves to rouse, excite, or animate; a stimulus.  (OED)

"Fontane charts the course of the Holks’ marital decline in his usual desultory way—there’s a slow accumulation of talk and events, and then that climactic fillip. The couple bicker about which schools to send the children to; Helmut, suddenly called upon to fulfill his duty as courtier, goes away to Copenhagen for some weeks, where he flirts inconclusively with his landlady’s daughter and, more conclusively, with Ebba ('Eve'), a rather spiky lady-in-waiting to the elderly Princess whom they both serve. He doesn’t write often enough to Christine; there’s a fire in the castle where the Princess is holding court (no one gets hurt); in a fit of midlife foolishness, Helmut tells Christine it’s all over and proposes to the lady-in-waiting, who then tells him off ('You’re always sinning against the most elementary rules of the game'); eventually, he comes home to his wife. The moment of narrative 'excitement' takes place five pages from the end of the book. As Holk’s scheming landlady says of her daughter’s wayward life, 'It’s something of a love-story but it’s not a proper love-story.'"

 -  Daniel Mendelsohn, "Heroine Addict: What Theodor Fontane's women want", 7 March 2011 The New Yorker

Word of the day: obliquity

The word of the day is obliquity:

< Middle French obliquité inclination at an oblique angle (second half of the 13th cent. in Old French as obliqueté), angle at which the celestial equator is inclined to the ecliptic (c1370), indirectness, lack of frankness (1541) < classical Latin oblīquitāt-, oblīquitās inclination at an oblique angle, in post-classical Latin also indirectness, ambiguity (early 5th cent.), grammatical inflection (13th cent. in British sources) < oblīquusoblique adj. + -tās (see -ty suffix¹; compare -ity suffix).

 I. Physical senses.

 1.a. The quality of being oblique in direction, position, or form; inclination at an oblique angle to a straight line or plane; the degree or extent of such inclination.

b. Astron.  obliquity of the ecliptic n. the angle at which the plane of the ecliptic is inclined to that of the celestial equator.

c. Bot. Of a leaf: the property of having unequal sides.

 II. Non-physical senses.

2. Divergence from right conduct or thought; perversity, aberration; an instance of this, a fault, an error.

3. Indirectness in action, conduct, speech, etc.; a way or method that is not direct or straightforward.

4. Deviation from any rule or order. Obs. rare.

5. Grammar. Inflection for case, declension. Obs. rare. (OED)

"At first glance, it’s hard to reconcile the sparseness of Fontane’s plots, the way he prefers to linger over what he calls “the circumstantial,” with the extravagant emotions his work has provoked in so many critics and writers over the years. (Thomas Mann: “No writer of the past or the present awakens in me the sympathy and gratitude, the unconditional and instinctive delight, the immediate amusement and warmth and satisfaction that I feel in every verse, in every line of one of his letters, in every snatch of his dialogue.”) The key lies in his understated narrative style, in his paradoxically powerful “discretion,” as some critics have called it: a gift for obliquity, for knowing what to leave out, and above all for letting the reader “overhear” the speech of his characters, rather than paraphrasing it for us—the last being a particularly effective alternative to the psychologizing observations of an omniscient narrator."

 -  Daniel Mendelsohn, "Heroine Addict: What Theodor Fontane's women want", 7 March 2011 The New Yorker

I'm going with definition 3 here.