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Archive through August 13, 2005

The TVClubHouse: General Discussions ARCHIVES: 2005 Dec. ~ 2006 Feb.: Free Expression: Word a day (ARCHIVES): Archive through August 13, 2005 users admin

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Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Friday, July 22, 2005 - 3:10 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for July 22nd


ineluctable \in-ih-LUCK-tuh-buhl, adjective:
Impossible to avoid or evade; inevitable.

. . . ineluctable as gravity.
--Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam

California's vision of itself as a car culture grew out of the impracticality of mass transit in reaching most of its scenic wonders, the innate restlessness of its inhabitants and the ineluctable attraction of an open road.



(Message edited by nancy on July 22, 2005)

Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Saturday, July 23, 2005 - 4:51 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for July 23rd

parvenu \PAR-vuh-noo; PAR-vuh-nyoo, noun:
a person who has suddenly risen to a higher economic status but has not gained social acceptance of others in that class

--parvenu, adjective:
of or characteristic of a parvenu; characteristic of someone who has risen economically or socially but lacks the social skills appropriate for this new position

``A Classical education helps you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of. In this country [America] the mystery writer is looked down on as sub-literary merely because he is a mystery writer, rather than for instance a writer of social significance twaddle. To a classicist -- even a very rusty one -- such an attitude is merely a parvenu insecurity.''
--Tom Hiney, Raymond Chandler


Heyltslori
Moderator

09-15-2001

Saturday, July 23, 2005 - 7:56 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Heyltslori a private message Print Post    
These are great Nancy! Cool idea for a thread. Keep 'em coming! :-)

Lumbele
Member

07-12-2002

Sunday, July 24, 2005 - 9:21 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Lumbele a private message Print Post    
Nancy, I am enjoying this thread, too. It keeps the grey cells active. Thanks!

Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Sunday, July 24, 2005 - 10:11 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for July 24th

exiguity (ek-suh-GYOO-uht-ee), noun: Scantiness; smallness; thinness;the quality of being meager. --EXIGUOUS, adjective

"An exiguity of cloth that would only allow of miniature capes" --George Eliot

"The soldiers' pay is in the highest degree exiguous; not above three half-pence a day." --Carlyle


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Exiguity derives from the Latin exiguitas, itself from exiguus, meaning "strictly weighed," which came to signify "too strictly weighed"; hence, "meager." Related to exact ("precisely weighed or determined").



Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Sunday, July 24, 2005 - 10:13 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
your welcome--there will be a test on these later--

(just kidding)

Vee
Member

02-23-2004

Sunday, July 24, 2005 - 10:14 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Vee a private message Print Post    
I love this idea, too. Thank you!!

Lumbele
Member

07-12-2002

Sunday, July 24, 2005 - 10:21 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Lumbele a private message Print Post    
You better hope nobody is going to test you then, TeachNancy, because most of us here suffer from a bad case of CRS, ergo incapable of putting feathers in your cap. But it's nice to know a new word every day - for a few minutes anyway.

Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Monday, July 25, 2005 - 9:19 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for July 25th


chimerical \ky-MER-i-kul; -MIR-; ki-, adjective:
Merely imaginary; fanciful; fantastic; wildly or vainly conceived; produced by a wildly fanciful imagination; having, or capable of having, no existence except in thought; as, "chimerical projects".

'[H]er name is Dulcinea; her country El Toboso, a village in La Mancha; her degree at least that of Princess, for she is my Queen and mistress; her beauty superhuman, for in her are realized all the impossible and chimerical attributes of beauty which poets give to their ladies.
--Cervantes, Don Quixote

Spanish galleons, of course, hold out the prospect (usually chimerical) of caskets of jewels and sacks of doubloons.
--James Hamilton-Paterson, Three Miles


Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - 4:53 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for July 26th

interregnum \in-tur-REG-num, noun:

1. The interval between two reigns; any period when a state is left without a ruler.
2. A period of freedom from authority or during which government functions are suspended.
3. Any breach of continuity in an order; a lapse or interval in a continuity.


Forewarned by his equations that the Galactic Empire is about to collapse, Seldon hopes to shorten the inevitable interregnum from a predicted 30,000 years of bloody anarchy to a mere thousand.
--Gerald Jonas, review of Foundation's Fear, by Gregory Benford, New York Times, April 6, 1997

"Architecture Culture" presents 74 essays, speeches and magazine articles from the postwar era, a period Ms. Ockman describes as an interregnum between modernism and post-modernism.
--Herbert Muschamp, "The Creative Ferment Behind the Glass Boxes," New York Times, June 13, 1993

They were at the moment enjoying a sort of interregnum }from Roman authority.
--Frederic William Farrar, Life of St. Paul



Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - 3:20 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for for July 27th


meretricious \mer-ih-TRISH-us, adjective:
1. Of or pertaining to prostitutes; having to do with prostitutes.
2. Alluring by false show; gaudily and deceitfully ornamental; tawdry; as, meretricious dress or ornaments.


The shiny marble, bronze and brass, the gilded building crowns, the gaudy Atlantic City casinos, the spangled showgirls: it all adds up in their eyes to vulgar excess, an unsophisticate's delight in meretricious baubles.

--Herbert Muschamp, "Trump, His Gilded Taste, and Me," New York Times, December 19, 1999


Because only the most starry-eyed difference feminist could seriously have imagined that "women's culture" would be any more noble, intelligent, high-minded or less blatantly meretricious than the "male culture" peddled by Maxim magazine and Comedy Central's "Man Show."
--Francine Prose, "A Wasteland Of One's Own," New York Times Magazine, February 13, 2000


It's true that Bismarck didn't die, but we should be warned that nature is terribly fickle and history eternally meretricious.
--Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas


Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Thursday, July 28, 2005 - 4:37 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for for July 28th


contumely \kon-TYOO-muh-lee; -TOO-; KON-tyoo-mee-lee; -too-; KON-tum-lee, noun:


Rudeness compounded of haughtiness and contempt; scornful insolence; despiteful treatment; disdain; contemptuousness in act or speech; disgrace.

Nothing aggravates tyranny so much as contumely.
--Edmund Burke


The pedlars find satisfaction for all contumelies in making good bargains.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks


[F]ollowing years of police harassment and public contumely, he was arrested and charged with high treason, espionage and ''anti-Soviet activity.''
--"Know Thyself, Free Thyself," New York Times, June 5, 1988



Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Friday, July 29, 2005 - 9:36 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for for July 29th



interlard \in-tur-LARD, transitive verb:
To insert between; to mix or mingle; especially, to introduce that which is foreign or irrelevant; as, to interlard a conversation with oaths or allusions.


Every night we lined up books on the floor, interlarding mine with his before putting them on the shelves.
--Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader


At home, she made herself understood in Friulian, but on jaunts with her mother around the village, conversations were interlarded with Italian, German, and Slovenian.
--Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow


[B]ut should a grave preacher interlard his discourses with such fooleries?
--Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman


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Interlard comes from Middle French entrelarder, from Old French, from entre, "between" (from Latin inter-) + larder, "to lard," from larde, "lard," from Latin lardum. The original sense of the word, now obsolete, was "to place lard or bacon amongst; to mix, as fat meat with lean


Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Friday, July 29, 2005 - 9:37 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
***********************

BONUS: Write a sentence with as many of these words as possible , and you MIGHT win something(or not)

**********************

Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Sunday, July 31, 2005 - 5:53 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for August 1st


lucubration loo-kyoo-BRAY-shun; loo-kuh-, noun:

1. The act of studying by candlelight; nocturnal study; meditation.

2. That which is composed by night; that which is produced by meditation in retirement; hence (loosely) any literary composition.


A point of information for those with time on their hands: if you were to read 135 books a day, every day, for a year, you wouldn't finish all the books published annually in the United States. Now add to this figure, which is upward of 50,000, the 100 or so literary magazines; the scholarly, political and scientific journals (there are 142 devoted to sociology alone), as well as the glossy magazines, of which bigger and shinier versions are now spawning, and you'll appreciate the amount of lucubration that finds its way into print.
--Arthur Krystal, "On Writing: Let There Be Less," New York Times, March 26, 1989


One of his characters is given to lucubration. "Things die on us," he reflects as he lies in bed, "we die on each other, we die of ourselves."
--"Books of The Times," New York Times, February 7, 1981

Naturally, these fictions ran the risk of tumbling down the formalist hill and ending up at the bottom without readers -- except the heroic students of Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco, professors whose lucubrations were much more interesting than the books about which they theorized.
--Mario Vargas Llosa, "Thugs Who Know Their Greek," New York Times, September 7, 1986


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Lucubration comes from Latin lucubratus, past participle of lucubrare, to work by night, composed at night (as by candlelight), ultimately connected with lux, light. Hence it is related to lucent, shining, bright; and lucid, bright with the radiance of intellect. The verb form is lucubrate.



Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Monday, August 01, 2005 - 3:35 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word-a-day for August 1, 2005


hardscrabble \HARD-skrab-uhl, adjective:
1. Yielding a bare or meager living with great labor or difficulty.

2. Marked by poverty.


I remember it being green and humid, nothing like this hardscrabble land.
--Elmore Leonard, Cuba Libre

Most inhabitants scratched out a living from hardscrabble farming, yet these newcomers were hopeful and enterprising.
--Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.


A scenic town fed by rich snowbirds who reside a few months a year in gated communities, High Balsam also is home to the hardscrabble residents who frequent Margaret's food-pantry giveaways.
--Deirdre Donahue, "A sweet 'Evensong,' " USA Today, December 2, 1999


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Hardscrabble is formed from hard (from Old English heard) + scrabble (from Dutch schrabbelen, "to scratch").


Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 - 3:58 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word-a-day for August 2, 2005

abulia, also aboulia \uh-BOO-lee-uh; uh-BYOO-, }

noun:
Loss or impairment of the ability to act or to make decisions.

I was suffering from an aboulia, you know. I couldn't seem to make decisions.
--Anatole Broyard, "Reading and Writing; (Enter Pound and Eliot)," New York Times, May 30, 1982

There's little escape from her black hole of abulia.
--James Saynor, "Woman in the Midst of a Nervous Breakdown," New York Times, June 12, 1994


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Abulia derives from Greek a-, "without" + boule, "will." The adjective form is abulic.



Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 - 4:02 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word-a-day for August 3, 2005


succor \SUH-kur, noun:
1. Aid; help; assistance; especially, assistance that relieves and delivers from difficulty, want, or distress.
2. The person or thing that brings relief.

transitive verb:
To help or relieve when in difficulty, want, or distress; to assist and deliver from suffering; to relieve; as, to succor a besieged city.


Ever since I was five, I have inserted myself into every movie I've seen and gratefully, humbly found succor there.
--Laurie Fox, My Sister from the Black Lagoon

In Asakusa, a crowd sought succor around an old and lovely Buddhist temple, dedicated to Kannon, goddess of mercy
--Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire

He honors the old, succors the infirm, raises the downtrodden, destroys fanaticism.
--Alan Jolis, Love and Terror


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Succor derives from Latin succurrere, "to run under, to run or hasten to the aid or assistance of one," from sub- + currere, "to run."



Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Thursday, August 04, 2005 - 2:57 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word-a-day for August 3, 2005

leitmotif \LYT-moh-teef, noun:

1. In music drama, a marked melodic phrase or short passage which always accompanies the reappearance of a certain person, situation, abstract idea, or allusion in the course of the play; a sort of musical label.

2. A dominant and recurring theme.


Each actor to appear on stage is accompanied by a musical phrase on the drum -- a sort of leitmotif to characterize an emotion, much like a Wagnerian drama.
--Eleanor Blau, "Connecticut's Shakespeare," New York Times, July 9, 1982

One theme had recurred so frequently in these conversations that it had become the leitmotif of the trip.
--Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire

As is so often the case in a crazy household . . . guilt becomes a leitmotif.
--Frederick Busch, "My Brother, Myself," New York Times, February 9, 1997

Such sudden whims, seeming to fly in the face of conventional expectations but really motivated by profound, if unexamined, psychological needs, become a leitmotif of the novel, whose chief concern is whether people can ever claim to know themselves -- or one another -- at all.
--Elizabeth Tallent, " 'Thou Shalt Settle for Less and Less,' " New York Times, May 7, 1989


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Leitmotif, also spelled leitmotiv, is from German Leitmotiv, "leading motif," from leiten, to lead (from Old High German leitan) + Motiv, motif (from the French). It is especially associated with the operas of German composer Richard Wagner.



Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Friday, August 05, 2005 - 7:29 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word-a-day for August 5, 2005



Vexillology \vek-sil-AHL-uh-jee, noun:

the study of flags


"This unknown specialist has demonstrated his great knowledge of heraldry and
vexillology." --Occasional Newsletter to Librarians, Jan. 4 1966

"One of the most interesting phases of
vexillology...is the important contribution to our heritage of flags by the Arab World." --Arab World, Oct. 13, 1959


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From Latin vexillum, "flag" + (Greek) -logy (from logos, " word, discourse").



Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Saturday, August 06, 2005 - 10:00 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word-a-day for August 6, 2005


quotidian \kwoh-TID-ee-uhn, adjective:

1. Occurring or returning daily; as, a quotidian fever.
2. Of an everyday character; ordinary, commonplace, trivial.


"Thus, art for Amulya Chandra Pal is inextricably bound up with ordinary life. 'The process of skilled creation is not divided from the quotidian flow.... It belongs to the daily round of work, and even its most glorious products are meshed in commerce and destined for participatory roles in human affairs'."
--"Quotidian Treasures: A folklorist explores the visual traditions of Bangladesh," New York Times, March 8, 1998


"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


"She also had a sense of fun that was often drummed out under the dull, quotidian beats of suburban life."
--Meg Wolitzer, Surrender, Dorothy


Quotidian is from Latin quotidianus, from quotidie, daily, from quotus, how many + dies, day


Heyltslori
Moderator

09-15-2001

Saturday, August 06, 2005 - 10:11 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Heyltslori a private message Print Post    
Hey Nancy, I really enjoy these quotidian words you give us! :-)

Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Wednesday, August 10, 2005 - 5:08 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
anodyne • \AN-uh-dyne\ • adjective
1 : serving to alleviate pain
*2 : not likely to offend or arouse tensions : innocuous

Example sentence:
Afraid of seeming overly critical, the new coach would only offer a few anodyne suggestions.

Did you know?
"Anodyne" came to English via Latin from Greek "anōdynos" ("without pain"), and it has been used as both an adjective and a noun ("something that relieves pain") since the 16th century. It has sometimes been used of things that dull or lull the senses and render painful experiences less so. Edmund Burke used it this way, for example, in 1790 when he referred to flattery as an "anodyne draft of oblivion" that renders one (in this particular case, the deposed king Louis XVI) forgetful of the flatterer's true feelings. In the 1930s, a newer second sense began appearing in our vocabulary. Now, in addition to describing things that dull pain, "anodyne" can also refer to that which doesn't cause discomfort in the first place.




Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Thursday, August 11, 2005 - 4:53 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for Thursday August 11, 2005


nugatory \NOO-guh-tor-ee; NYOO-, adjective:
1. Trifling; insignificant; inconsequential.
2. Having no force; inoperative; ineffectual.

Tygiel's forte as a historian is his eye for what may appear nugatory or marginal but, when focused upon, illuminates the temper of a given moment.
--Roberto Gonzlez Echevarria, "From Ruth to Rotisserie," New York Times, July 2, 2000

Jacoby's offense was no offense -- or an error so nugatory as to demand no more than a one-sentence explanation.
--Lance Morrow, "In Boston, a Foolish Consistency of Little Minds," Time, July 19, 2000

Socialism no longer restrains; trade unions do so much less than they did; moral inhibitions over the acquisition and display of wealth are nugatory.
--John Lloyd, "If not socialism, what will persuade the rich willingly to pay more taxes to help the poor and preserve a decent society?" New Statesman, August 2, 1996


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Nugatory comes from Latin nugatorius, from nugari, "to trifle," from nugae, "jests, trifles."



Nancy
Member

08-01-2000

Saturday, August 13, 2005 - 3:40 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post Send Nancy a private message Print Post    
Word of the Day for Sat August 13, 2005




afflatus \uh-FLAY-tuhs, noun:
A divine impartation of knowledge; supernatural impulse; inspiration.

Whatever happened to passion and vision and the divine afflatus in poetry?
--Clive Hicks, "From `Green Man' (Ronsdale)," Toronto Star, November 21, 1999

Aristophanes must have eclipsed them... by the exhibition of some diviner faculty, some higher spiritual afflatus.
--John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets


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Afflatus is from Latin afflatus, from afflare, to blow at or breathe on, from ad-, at + flare, to puff, to blow. It is related to deflate, "to blow the wind out of" (de-, out of); inflate, "to blow wind into" (in-, in or into); conflate, "to blow together, hence to bring together; to combine" (con-, with, together); and soufflé, the "puffed up" dish (from French souffler, to puff, from Latin sufflare, to blow from below, hence to blow up, to puff up, from sub-, below + flare). Yes, it is related to flatulent as well.