Word of the day: cupidinous

The word of the day is cupidinous:

1. eager or excessive desire, especially to possess something; greed; avarice.

mid-15c., from Anglo-Fr. cupidite, from M.Fr. cupidité, from L. cupiditas "passionate desire," from cupidus "eager, passionate," from cupere "to desire" (perhaps cognate with Skt. kupyati "bubbles up, becomes agitated," O.Slav. kypeti "to boil," Lith. kupeti "to boil over"). Despite the erotic sense of the Latin word, in English cupidity originally, and still especially, means "desire for wealth." (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cupidinous)

"Van Hove's 'Roman Tragedies' eliminates the first scene of 'Antony and Cleopatra,' which includes a voluptuous embrace and depicts 'the triple pillar of the world / transform'd into a strumpet's fool.'  But this eluded verse is later enacted, during Antony's passionate leave-taking of Cleopatra before battle.  As Antony dresses, the couple laugh and fumble cupidinously; they kiss passionately for a full minute as the music—Bob Dylan singing 'Not Dark Yet'—surrounds them, and Antony's advisers look sternly on."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Theatre laid bare: Ivo van Hove's raw productions bring out the elemental drama of classic works", 26 October 2015 The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/26/theatre-laid-bare)

Word of the day: lath

The word of the day is lath:

1. a thin, narrow strip of wood, used with other strips to form latticework, a backing for plaster or stucco, a support for slates and other roofing materials, etc.
2. a group or quantity of such strips.
3. work consisting of such strips.
4. wire mesh or the like used in place of wooden laths as a backing for plasterwork.
5. a thin, narrow, flat piece of wood used for any purpose.

O.E. *laððe, variant of lætt "lath," apparently from P.Gmc. *laþþo (cf. O.N. latta, M.Du., Ger. latte "lath," M.H.G. lade "plank," which is source of Ger. Laden "counter," hence, "shop").

(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lath)

"When Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America: Millennium Approaches' opened on Broadway, in 1993, in a production directed by George C. Wolfe, the play ended with a winged angel crashing into a dying man's bedroom from above, shattering lath and plaster."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Theatre laid bare: Ivo van Hove's raw productions bring out the elemental drama of classic works", 26 October 2015 The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/26/theatre-laid-bare)

word of the day: ormolu

The word of the day is ormolu:

noun

1. Also called mosaic gold. an alloy of copper and zinc used to imitate gold.

2. Also called bronze doré, gilt bronze. gilded metal, especially cast brass or bronze gilded over fire with an amalgam of gold and mercury, used for furniture mounts and ornamental objects.

3. gold or gold powder prepared for use in gilding.

 

Origin

< French or moulu ground gold, equivalent to or (< Latin aurum) + moulu, past participle of moudre to grind < Latin molere (dictionary.com)

"The previous week, another great Strad had gone unsold, at Christie's, despite considerable hype: the Kreutzer violin, part of the estate of Huguette Clark.  Sealed bids had also been invited for the Kreutzer, with an estimate of seven and a half million dollars.  The Carpenters had attended that auction, and had come away not with the Strad - it was overpriced, in their opinion, especially with the Christie's commission - but with an ormolu occasional table that had belonged to Clark, her rubber thimbles still in its inner compartments."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Musical gold: Can three ambitious siblings turn old violins into a new investment strategy?", 28 July 2014 The New Yorker

word of the day: sybaritic

The word of the day is sybaritic:

adjective

1. (usually lowercase) pertaining to or characteristic of a sybarite; characterized by or loving luxury or sensuous pleasure: to wallow in sybaritic splendor.

2. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Sybaris or its inhabitants. (dictionary.com)

"Once the rebels break through, Bong and his production designer, Ondrej Nekvasil, provide them with a series of sybaritic astonishments: a sunlit greenhouse garden, a mahogany sleeper car, and party rooms in which toffs, dressed in gowns and rave wear, get stoned, drink, and dance."

 - David Denby, "Endgames: 'Snowpiercer' and 'Begin Again'", 7 & 14 July 2014 The New Yorker


"He was wearing a ten-thousand-dollar ivory-colored tuxedo with blue satin trim by Angelo Galasso, which made him look like a sybaritic sea captain."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Musical Gold: Can three ambitious siblings turn old violins into a new investment strategy?", 28 July 2014 The New Yorker

word of the day: tonsure

The word of the day is tonsure:

Etymology:  < French tonsure (14th cent. in Godefroy), or < Latin tonsūra a shearing or clipping, < tondēre , tons-um

 

1. gen. The action or process of clipping the hair or shaving the head; the state of being shorn. 

2.a. spec. The shaving of the head or part of it as a religious practice or rite, esp. as a preparation to entering the priesthood or a monastic order.

b. The part of a priest's or monk's head left bare by shaving the hair.

3. The clipping  (a) of coin;  (b) of shrubs or hedges. Obs. rare. (OED)

"Much of the human hair used in wigmaking and weave-styling grew on Indian heads - a significant amount of it, Neufeld's book reveals, coming from a temple in the town of Tirupati, where every year two million people are ritually tonsured."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Field notes: Hair today", 24 September 2012 The New Yorker

Word of the day: dilatory

 The word of the day is dilatory:

Latin dīlātōri-us, < dīlātōr-em a delayer, agent-n. < differre, dīlāt- to defer v.¹, delay: see dilate v.¹ Compare French dilatoire (13th cent. in Hatzfeld & Darmesteter). (OED)

 1.  a. Tending to cause delay; made for the purpose of gaining time or deferring decision or action.    

b. Law. dilatory plea, a plea put in for the sake of delay.  

2. Given to or characterized by delay; slow, tardy.   

a. Of persons, their characters, habits, etc.  

b. Of actions.  

B. n. Law.  A means of procuring delay; a dilatory plea

"George Eliot is an author whom dilatory writers can point to with some optimism: she didn't start writing fiction until she was thirty-six, and then only at the encouragement of Lewes, who suspected that she might have a talent for 'concrete description' as she wrote later in an essay titled 'How I Came to Write Fiction.'"

 - Rebecca Mead, "Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot teaches us", February 14 & 21, 2011, The New Yorker

Word of the day: wainscot

The word of the day is wainscot:

Middle Low German wagenschot (1389 in Schiller and Lübben), apparently < wagen carriage, wagon n. + schot (of uncertain meaning; compare bokenschot, modern Low German bökenschot, beechwood of superior quality). Compare 16th cent. Flemish waegheschot, waeghenschot (Kilian), West Flemish wageschot (De Bo), Dutch wagenschot, West Frisian wagenskot. The synonymous Flemish or Dutch wandschot (Kilian), which may be the source of some of the English forms, is either an etymologizing perversion of wagenschot or an independent formation on wand wall of a room. The English examples of the word are earlier than those given in the Middle Low German and Middle Dutch dicts., and the first element appears already in the earliest instances assimilated to the English wain n.¹The etymology as above stated does not clearly account for the meaning, and there have been attempts to explain the first element differently. Kilian (1598) identifies it with Flemish waeghe wave, taking it to refer to the undulation in the grain of the wood. Some modern scholars regard it as an alteration of Middle Dutch weeg wall (= Old Frisian wâch, Old English wáh, wough n.¹). These suggestions are however open to strong objection, and the probability is that the first element is really wagen, though the original meaning of the compound remains for the present obscure.... 

A superior quality of foreign oak imported from Russia, Germany, and Holland, chiefly used for fine panel-work; logs or planks of this oak; oak boarding for panel-work. Now only technical. (OED)

"George Eliot's own parlor - at the Priory, the London home that she shared with Lewes for fifteen years - is re-created at the Nuneaton museum.  It has wainscoting, dark-green wallpaper, and a table draped in lace, set with an oil lamp and a tea cake."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot teaches us", February 14 & 21, 2011, The New Yorker

Word of the day: valence

The word of the day is valence:

Latin valentia; see valency n.(Show Less)

  

1. An extract or preparation (of some herb) used in medicine. Obs. 

2. Valour, courage; = valiance n. 1. Obs. 

3. Chem.   = valency n. 2.  

4. Psychol. Emotional force or significance, spec. the feeling of attraction or repulsion with which an individual invests an object or event. (OED)

"Next, Melissa Raines, who teaches at Liverpool University, gave a paper in which she examined the emotional valence of Eliot's punctuation and pointed out that Maggie's speech tends to devolve into dashes when she is most susceptible to the influence of Stephen Guest, her seducer, but maintains the discipline of periods, colons, and semicolons when her better nature is dominant.  Raines was a proofreader before she became an academic."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot teaches us", February 14 & 21, 2011, The New Yorker

I'm going with definition 4 here.

Word of the day: callow

The word of the day is callow:

Old English calu (def. calw-e) < West Germanic kalwo-, whence also Middle Low German kale, Middle Dutch cāle (calu, genitive caluwes), Old High German chalo (def. chalwe, chalawe), Middle High German kal (kalwe), German kahl, by Kluge thought to be cognate with Lithuanian gŏlŭ naked, blank; but not improbably an adoption of Latin calv-us bald. Compare Irish and Gaelic calbh bald.... 

1. Bald, without hair. Obs. 

2.  a. Of birds: Unfledged, without feathers. 

b. Applied to the down of unfledged birds; and so, to the down on a youth's cheek and chin.   

3. fig. Inexperienced, raw, ‘unfledged’. (OED)

"I have gone back to 'Middlemarch' every five years or so, my emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting.  In my judgmental twenties, I thought that Ladislaw, with his brown curls and his callow artistic dabbling, was not entirely deserving of Dorothea; by forty, I could better measure the appeal of his youthful energies and Byronic hairdressing, at least to his middle-aged creator, who was fifty-three when the book was published."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot teaches us", February 14 & 21, 2011, The New Yorker

Word of the day: citrine

The word of the day is citrine:

French citrin, < Latin type *citrīn-us, < citrus. Compare Italian citrino, etc.... 

   Having the light yellow or greenish-yellow colour of a lemon or citron; lemon-coloured. (OED)

"In my Penguin English library edition, I marked what seemed to me particularly salient passages with a fluorescent yellow pen; the highlights have faded now to an almost imperceptible citrine."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot teaches us", February 14 & 21, 2011, The New Yorker