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

word of the day: obsequy

The word of the day is obsequy:

 

noun, plural obsequies. Usually, obsequies

1. a funeral rite or ceremony.

< Late Latin obsequiae, alteration (by confusion with exsequiae funeral rites) of obsequia, plural of Latin obsequium (dictionary.com)


"The implicit comparisons recur in Italy, where the men visit the towns in which the sexual outlaws Byron and Shelley lived, shortly before their deaths.  The comics perform funerary obsequies for the poets and again recite in their own and others' voices.  'The Trip to Italy', for all its japes, is haunted by mortality, as was its namesake, 'Viaggio in Italia' (1954), the Rosselini masterpiece starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman as a warring couple dismally on tour.  Like them, Coogan and Brydon visit the museum at Pompeii, with its plaster casts of the bodies of the dead.  Rosselini showed us a couple who died locked in embrace when Vesuvius exploded, a harsh reflection on the modern couple's marital anguish.  Here, in a blasphemous reduction, Brydon summons his man-in-a-box voice to play a Pompeian lying in a glass case; the two carry on a discreet gay flirtation.  It's not that the end is nigh for these men, but death, for them and for Winterbottom, is always present in life."

 - David Denby, "Lasting impressions: 'The Trip to Italy'", 1 September 2014 The New Yorker

word of the day: maunder

The word of the day is maunder:

verb (used without object)

1. to talk in a rambling, foolish, or meaningless way.

2. to move, go, or act in an aimless, confused manner (dictionary.com)

"As a portrait of male friendship, the 'Trip' films are a triumph of the lean British comic style over the maunder and the mush of American bromance - Jason Segel and Seth Rogen pinching each other's blubber."

 - David Denby, "Lasting impressions: 'The Trip to Italy'", 1 September 2014 The New Yorker 

word of the day: dyspeptic

The word of the day is dyspeptic:

adjective

1. pertaining to, subject to, or suffering from dyspepsia.

2. gloomy, pessimistic, and irritable.

peptikós pertaining to digestion (dictionary.com)

"In the 'Trip' films, playing a version of himself, he's intelligent and dyspeptic, a man too clever to live by illusions but too ambitious to give them up.  He's dissatisfied with everything - his career, his relationship with his children, his waning sexual attractiveness - and he takes it out on his friend."

 - David Denby, "Lasting impressions: 'The Trip to Italy'", 1 September 2014 The New Yorker 

word of the day: sally

The word of the day is sally:

noun

1. a sortie of troops from a besieged place upon an enemy.

2. a sudden rushing forth or activity.

3. an excursion or trip, usually off the main course.

4. an outburst or flight of passion, fancy, etc.:

5. a clever, witty, or fanciful remark.

6. Carpentry. a projection, as of the end of a rafter beyond the notch by which the rafter is fitted over the wall plate.

< Middle French saillie attack, noun use of feminine past participle of saillir to rush forward < Latin salīre to leap (dictionary.com)

"The pace almost equals that of Robin Williams doing standup, but Coogan and Brydon reprise their best sallies for rhythm and for emphasis, so you won't miss anything that matters."

 - David Denby, "Lasting impressions: 'The Trip to Italy'", 1 September 2014 The New Yorker 

word of the day: querulous

The word of the day is querulous:

adjective

1. full of complaints; complaining.

2. characterized by or uttered in complaint; peevish: a querulous tone; constant querulous reminders of things to be done.

< Latin querulus, equivalent to quer(ī) to complain (dictionary.com)


"People are made for walking, but we are not very good at it; our backs and arches, like querulous cabinet ministers, at first complain and then resign."

 - Adam Gopnik, "Heaven's gaits: what we do when we walk", 1 September 2014 The New Yorker

word of the day: louche

The word of the day is louche:

adjective

1. dubious; shady; disreputable.

< French: literally, cross-eyed < Latin luscus blind in one eye (dictionary.com)

"When an impoverished student at Stanford, the first in his family to go to college, opts for a six-figure salary in finance after graduation, a very different but equally compelling kind of 'moral imagination' may be at play.  (Imagine being able to pay off your loans and never again having to worry about keeping a roof over your family's heads.)  William S. Burroughs, a corporate scion of elite genealogy, began reinventing himself at Harvard as a louche explorer of the underworld.  Why shouldn't someone who grew up in a crack-blighted neighborhood be equally free to imagine himself as a suit?"

 - Nathan Heller, "Poison ivy: Are elite colleges bad for the soul?", 1 September 2014 The New Yorker 

word of the day: badinage

The word of the day is badinage:

noun

1. light, playful banter or raillery.

< French, equivalent to badin (er) to joke, trifle (verbal derivative of badin joker, banterer < Old Provençal: fool; bad (ar) to gape (< Vulgar Latin batāre) (dictionary.com)

"The old back-and-forth is still there, the old badinage, the old rapport; and with pleasure we finish our hamburgers and catch up on each other's news."

 - Joseph O'Neill, "The Referees", 1 September 2014 The New Yorker 

word of the day: phragmites

The word of the day is phragmites:

noun

1. any of several tall grasses of the genus Phragmites, having plumed heads, growing in marshy areas, especially the common reed P. australis (or P. communis).

< Greek phragmī́tēs growing in hedges, equivalent to phrágm (a) fence, breastwork, screen (noun derivative of phrássein (Attic phráttein) to fence in, hedge around) (dictionary.com)

 

 

"At the Fire Safety booth, the firefighters Lois Mungay and Stephen Comer were remembering some notable urban brush fires.  'By Howard Beach, one time, the dry phragmites reeds were burning like crazy out beyond Cross Bay Boulevard, and we were hauling the hoses around back there in the brush,' Comer said.  'We couldn't even see where the fire was!'"

 - Ian Frazier, "Only you", 1 September 2014 The New Yorker

word of the day: andesite

 The word of the day is andesite:

A gray, fine-grained volcanic rock. Andesite consists mainly of sodium-rich plagioclase and one or more mafic minerals such as biotite, hornblende, or pyroxene. It often contains small, visible crystals (phenocrysts) of plagioclase. It is the fine-grained equivalent of diorite. 
1840-50; named after Andes (dictionary.com)


"McInerney showed him pictures of andesite.
"'Local rock?' Ban wanted to know.
"McInerney and Maltz had a long conversation about wood, rocks, glass, sun, and snow, during which they excitedly presented Ban with images on cameras, phones, and an iPad, and in the project book for McInerney's site."

 - Dana Goodyear, "Paper palaces: the architect of the dispossessed meets the one per cent", 11 & 18 The New Yorker

word of the day: tatami

The word of the day is tatami:

noun

1. (in Japanese houses) any of a number of thick, woven straw mats of uniform dimensions, about three feet by six feet (91 cm by 183 cm), the placing of which determines the dimensions of an interior.

1895-1900; < Japanese, noun use of v.: to fold up (dictionary.com)

"Maltz, who was also living in Japan that year, in the only tatami room in the Bans' Western-style house, started to view him as 'the Pied Piper of architecture.'"

 - Dana Goodyear, "Paper palaces: the architect of the dispossessed meets the one per cent", 11 & 18 The New Yorker 

word of the day: plexus

The word of the day is plexus:

noun

1. a network, as of nerves or blood vessels.

2. any complex structure containing an intricate network of parts

1675-85; < Neo-Latin: an interweaving, twining = Latin plect(ere) to plait, twine + -tus suffix of v. action (dictionary.com)

 

 

"On August 9th, Ban will mark the public opening of the Aspen Art Museum, his first permanent museum in the United States.  The building, a glass box nested in a lattice screen made from resin-infused paper and topped with a timber truss roof, is an astonishing plexus of materials pushed to their limits."

 

 - Dana Goodyear, "Paper palaces: the architect of the dispossessed meets the one per cent", 11 & 18 August 2014 The New Yorker 

word of the day: futhark

The word of the day is futhark:

n.

1851, historians' name for the Germanic runic alphabet; so called from its first six letters, on the model of alphabet. (dictionary.com)

"But I remember a seed,
a dandelion sphere, which I blew on once, and its
silvery runes poured forward.  It's as if -
until now - I thought that I would never
fade, or fail, or fall silent, or die.
I trusted that I had it coming to me,
without cease, the firework of language.
Futhorc!  Let me cry out, again!"
 

 - Sharon Olds, "Bop after hip op", 11 & 18 August 2014 The New Yorker

word of the day: panegyric

The word of the day is panegyric:

noun

1. a lofty oration or writing in praise of a person or thing; eulogy.

2. formal or elaborate praise.

< Latin, noun use of panēgyricus of, belonging to a public assembly
< Greek panēgyrikós, equivalent to panḗgyr (is) solemn assembly (pan- + -ēgyris, combining form of ágyris gathering) (dictionary.com)


"One evening, I went to see Aleksandr Prokhanov, a far-right newspaper editor and novelist, whom I've known since the late eighties.  In the Soviet period, he was known as the Nightingale of the General Staff, a writer commissioned to ride and chronicle the glories of nuclear subs and strategic bombers and to visit the Cold War battlefields of Kampuchea and Angola.  He was a panegyrist of Stalin's military-industrial state and the achievements of Sovietism.  'No one,' he told me, 'could describe a nuclear reactor like I could.'"

 - David Remnick, "Watching the eclipse: Ambassador Michael McFaul was there when the promise of democracy came to Russia - and when it began to fade", 11 & 18 August 2014 The New Yorker