Word of the Week # 14

myrmidon \MUR-muh-don; -duhn\, noun:

1. (Capitalized) A member of a warlike Thessalian people who followed Achilles on the expedition against Troy.

2. A loyal follower, especially one who executes orders without question, protest, or pity.

"He risked assassination, torture or . . . retaliation, the defining signatures of Mr. Milosevic and his ultranationalist myrmidons."
-- Bruce Fein, "Follow U.S. war crimes advice?", Washington Times, May 10, 2001

"Those who created EMU [(European) Economic and Monetary Union] -- mainly politicians and their myrmidons in the offices and conference rooms of Brussels -- portray a beckoning landscape of wealth, liberty and economic power that will rival the United States and surpass Asia."
-- James O. Jackson, "The One-Way Bridge", Time, May 11, 1998

Myrmidon derives from Greek Myrmidones, a warlike people of ancient Thessaly

Word of the Week #13

abscond \ab-SKOND\, intransitive verb:
1. To depart secretly; to steal away and hide oneself -- used especially of persons who withdraw to avoid arrest or prosecution.


"The criminal is not concerned with influencing or affecting public opinion: he simply wants to abscond with his money or accomplish his mercenary task in the quickest and easiest way possible so that he may reap his reward and enjoy the fruits of his labours."
-- Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism

"Pearl, now an orphan (her father having absconded shortly after her conception), has been taken to live with her great-aunt Margaret in the north of England"
-- Zoe Heller, Everything You Know

Abscond comes from Latin abscondere, "to conceal," from ab-, abs-, "away" + condere, "to put, to place."

Word of the Week #11

truckle \TRUHK-uhl\, intransitive verb:
1. To yield or bend obsequiously to the will of another; to act in a subservient manner.


"Only where there was a "defiance," a "refusal to truckle," a "distrust of all authority," they believed, would institutions "express human aspirations, not crush them.""
-- Pauline Maier, "A More Perfect Union", New York Times, October 31, 1999

"The son struggled to be obedient to the conventional, commercial values of the father and, at the same time, to maintain his own playful, creative innocence. This conflict could make him truckle in the face of power."
-- Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, quoted in "Theater Friends Recall Life and Works of Odets," by Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, October 30, 1981

"I am convinced that, broadly speaking, the audience must accept the piece on my own terms; that it is fatal to truckle to what one conceives to be popular taste."
-- Sidney Joseph Perelman, quoted in "The Perelman Papers," by Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, March 15, 1981

Truckle is from truckle in truckle bed (a low bed on wheels that may be pushed under another bed; also called a trundle bed), in reference to the fact that the truckle bed on which the pupil slept was rolled under the large bed of the master. The ultimate source of the word is Greek trokhos, "a wheel."

Word of the Week #10

palindrome
1. a word, line, verse, number, sentence, etc., reading the same backward as forward, as Madam, I'm Adam or Poor Dan is in a droop.

Here are twenty-seven examples of palindromes taken from fun-with-words.com

Don't nod
Dogma: I am God
Never odd or even
Too bad – I hid a boot
Rats live on no evil star
No trace; not one carton
Was it Eliot's toilet I saw?
Murder for a jar of red rum
May a moody baby doom a yam?
Go hang a salami; I'm a lasagna hog!
A Toyota!
Race fast... safe car: a Toyota
Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
Doc Note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod
No, it never propagates if I set a gap or prevention
Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna
Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus
Some men interpret nine memos
Campus Motto: Bottoms up, Mac
Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
Madam, in Eden I'm Adam
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo
Ah, Satan sees Natasha
Lisa Bonet ate no basil
Do geese see God?
God saw I was dog
Dennis sinned

From Greek palindromos, running back again, recurring : palin, again; see kwel-1 in Indo-European roots + dromos, a running.] pal'in·dro'mic (-drō'mĭk, -drŏm'ĭk) adj.

Word of the Week #9

paroxysm \PAIR-uhk-siz-uhm\, noun:
1. (Medicine) A sudden attack, intensification, or recurrence of a disease.

2. Any sudden and violent emotion or action; an outburst; a fit.

"But when he's on target -- and more often than not he is -- he can send you into paroxysms of laughter."
-- William Triplett, "Drawing Laughter From a Well of Family Pain", Washington Post, June 13, 2002

"Dickens had a paroxysm of rage: 'Bounding up from his chair, and throwing his knife and fork on his plate (which he smashed to atoms), he exclaimed: "Dolby! your infernal caution will be your ruin one of these days!"'"
-- Edmund Wilson, "Dickens: The Two Scrooges", The Atlantic, April/May 1940

"Mrs. Bumble, seeing at a glance that the decisive moment had now arrived, and that a blow struck for mastership on one side or another, must necessarily be final and conclusive, dropped into a chair, and with a loud scream that Mr. Bumble was a hard-hearted brute, fell into a paroxysm of tears."
-- Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

Paroxysm is from Greek paroxusmos, from paroxunein, "to irritate, provoke or excite (literally to sharpen excessively)," from para-, "beyond" + oxunein, "to sharpen, to provoke."

Word of the Week #8

noisome \NOY-sum\, adjective:
1. Noxious; harmful; unwholesome.

2. Offensive to the smell or other senses; disgusting.


"The body politic produces noisome and unseemly substances, among which are politicians."
-- P. J. O'Rourke, "No Apparent Motive", The Atlantic, November 2002

"The first flower to bloom in this latitude, when the winter frost loosens its grip upon the sod, is not the fragrant arbutus, nor the delicate hepatica, nor the waxen bloodroot, as the poets would have us think, but the gross, uncouth, and noisome skunk cabbage."
-- Alvan F. Sanborn, "New York After Paris", The Atlantic, October 1906

"The most dangerous season was after the rice and indigo harvests in August and September when the waters were 'low, stagnant and corrupt' and the air made noisome with indigo plants hauled out of the water and left to rot in the fields."
-- Ronald Rees, "Under the weather: climate and disease, 1700-1900", History Today, January 1996

Noisome is from Middle English noysome, from noy, "harm," short for anoy, from Old French, from anoier, "to annoy."

Word of the Week #7

embonpoint \ahn-bohn-PWAN\, noun:
Plumpness of person; stoutness.


Example Sentences:

"With his embonpoint, Mr Soames appears to be wearing a quadruple-breasted suit."
-- Simon Hoggart, "Roll up, roll up, to explore the Soames Zone", The Guardian, February 1, 2000

"His embonpoint expands by the day and his eyes are buried in the fat of his cheeks.''
-- quoted in Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Revolution and Renunciation by Nicholas Boyle


Origin:
Embonpoint is from French, literally "in good condition" (en, "in" + bon, "good" + point, "situation, condition").

I think that we could safely declare the word 'embonpoint' to mean 'fat,' although the word fat was not included in the actual definition.

Word of the Week #5

impassible \im-PASS-uh-buhl\, adjective:
1. Incapable of suffering; not subject to harm or pain.

2. Unfeeling or not showing feeling.

"Body is flux and frustration, a locus of pain and process. If it becomes impassible and incorruptible, how is it still body?"
--Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven

"As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it"
--Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs

Impassible is from Late Latin impassibilis, from Latin in-, "not" + Late Latin passibilis, "passible; capable of feeling or suffering" from Latin passus, past participle of pati, "to suffer." It is related to passion, which originally meant "suffering" but came to apply to any strong feeling or emotion.

Word of the Week #6

Some of you may have read the title of this post and went "What?!? We just read a 'Word of the Week' post two seconds ago, and now I am going to read another one!"

That's right. You did just read a Word of the Week post. And if you continue to read this post you will read another Word of the Week post. You see, last week Spadoodles put up a wonderful post on my birthday and made an executive decision that she wouldn't post anything on Monday. (An apology will come.) As far as I can tell, that means you, our readers, have been deprived of a additional word for your vocabulary list.

To fix this dilemma I have decided to give you two posts today. Hope you like both of them.

fungible \FUHN-juh-buhl\, adjective:
1. (Law) Freely exchangeable for or replaceable by another of like nature or kind in the satisfaction of an obligation.

2. Interchangeable.

3. Something that is exchangeable or substitutable. Usually used in the plural.

"People think this tax is for Social Security. But tax monies are really fungible. They get raided all the time."
-- Eugene Ludwig, "Motivated to Work," interview by Kerry A. Dolan", Forbes, March 20, 2000

"The setting is Ireland in the 1950's, but, a cynical reader might reflect, this sort of fiction is so common that the characters will be completely fungible."
-- Susan Isaacs, "Three Little Girls From School", New York Times, December 30, 1990

"Genuine eros makes us desire a particular person; crude desire is satisfiable by fungible bodies."
-- Edward Craig (general editor), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Fungible comes from Medieval Latin fungibilis, from Latin fungi (vice), "to perform (in place of)."

By the way, some of you may be wondering about the photo at the top of this post. You know, the one with the muffins. Well I thought that I would let everyone know that it has nothing to do with the actual content of the post.

Word of the Week #4

solecism \SOL-uh-siz-uhm\, noun:


1. A nonstandard usage or grammatical construction; also, a minor blunder in speech.

2. A breach of good manners or etiquette.

3. Any inconsistency, mistake, or impropriety.

Example Sentences:
"An accurate report of anything that has ever been said in any parliament would be blather, solecism, verbiage and nonsense."
-- "Hansard of the Highlands", Times (London), February 17, 2001

"In those days smoking in the streets was an unpardonable solecism."
-- Edmund Yates, Recollections

Origin:
Solecism comes from Latin soloecismus, from Greek soloikizein, "to speak incorrectly," from soloikos, "speaking incorrectly," literally, "an inhabitant of Soloi," a city in ancient Cilicia where a dialect regarded as substandard was spoken.

Word of the Week #2

Here is the ETST Word of the Week. Some of our words are chosen because they sound intelligent even when we misuse them, or they were the Word of the Day on Dictionary.com. I picked this word because I just like saying it. "Quotidian. Quotidian. Quooootidian. Quotiddddian." OK, I'll stop now.

Quotidian \kwoh-TID-ee-uhn\, adjective: 1. Occurring or returning daily; as, a quotidian fever. 2. Of an everyday character; ordinary; commonplace.

Example Sentence: "Erasmus thought More's career as a lawyer was a waste of a fine mind, but it was precisely the human insights More derived from his life in the quotidian world that gave him a moral depth Erasmus lacked."
-- "More man than saint", Irish Times, April 4, 1998

Quotidian is from Latin quotidianus, from quotidie, "daily," from quotus, "how many, as many, so many" + dies, "day."

Word of the Week #1

Please go and use the Word of the Week as many times as you possibly can (without sounding strange). I'm up to 437.

Pugnacious adj. given to fighting; quarrelsome. [f. pugnaci(ty) (t. L: m.s. pugnacitas combativeness) + -ous] -pugnaciously, adv. -pugnacity , pugnaciousness, n.

Example Sentence: Although Larry appears to be peace-loving at home, he tends to revert to a pugnacious attitude while at work.