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This topic comprises 10 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10
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Author
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Topic: New Word Of The Day
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 12-24-2005 08:23 AM
Rated G ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
firmament \FUR-muh-muhnt\, noun:
1. The region of the air; the sky; the heavens.
2. The field or sphere of an interest or activity
But to judge by the twinkling summer stars that filled the firmament, the dawn was still far off.
--A. B. Yehoshua, A Journey to the End of the Millennium
Studying the firmament--the night vault that sparkles with thousands of flickering lights--is older than recorded history.
--William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age
The glossy magazines have branded her a rising star, shooting up into the firmament of mega fashion stardom.
--Hadley Freeman, "If I see one more black suit, I'll want to roll over and die," The Guardian, December 14, 2001
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 12-25-2005 10:32 AM
Rated G
jollification \jol-ih-fuh-KAY-shuhn\, noun:
Merrymaking; festivity; revelry.
Some inform; some prompt the conscience; some entertain, while having more than jollification in mind.
--Stuart Klawans, "A Greek Bearing Gifts," The Nation, June 21, 1999
In July, expect the usual impertinent jollifications in Key West: look-alike and Key-lime-pie-eating contests, arm-wrestling tournaments.
--David Gates, "Resurrecting Papa," Newsweek, April 12, 1999
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 12-26-2005 08:01 AM
Rated G
benefaction \BEN-uh-fak-shuhn; ben-uh-FAK-shuhn\, noun:
1. The act of conferring a benefit.
2. A benefit conferred; especially, a charitable donation.
Rockefeller's taxable income was then $33,000,000 and that his total fortune was probably more than $800,000,000. At that time he had distributed about $500,000,000 in public benefactions.
--"Financier's Fortune in Oil Amassed in Industrial Era of 'Rugged Individualism,'" New York Times, May 24, 1937
It may be, as some social psychologists argue, that the competitive urge to gain more is in time replaced by an equally competitive urge to win fame and favor through public benefactions.
--Robin W. Winks, Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 12-27-2005 06:36 AM
Rated G
apposite \AP-uh-zit\, adjective:
Being of striking appropriateness and relevance; very applicable; apt.
As we survey Jewish history as a whole from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, Judah Halevi's phrase "prisoner of hope" seems entirely apposite. The prisoner of hope is sustained and encouraged by his hope, even as he is confined by it.
--Jane S. Gerber (Editor), The Illustrated History of the Jewish People
Suppose, for example, that in a theoretical physics seminar we were to explain a very technical concept in quantum field theory by comparing it to the concept of aporia in Derridean literary theory. Our audience of physicists would wonder, quite reasonably, what is the goal of such a metaphor--whether or not it is apposite--apart from displaying our own erudition.
--Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 12-28-2005 05:48 AM
Rated G
cynosure \SY-nuh-shoor; SIN-uh-shoor\, noun:
1. Anything to which attention is strongly turned; a center of attraction.
2. That which serves to guide or direct.
3. [Capitalized]. The northern constellation Ursa Minor, which contains the North Star; also, the North Star itself.
The monarch, at the apex of court power and centre of its ritual, and the greatest patron of the arts, was the cynosure of this culture, standing (or, more usually, sitting) at the centre of a system of artistic practice intended to represent his or her sacred omnipotence and monopoly of power.
--John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination
Lucy is very pretty and becomes the cynosure not only of the aforementioned characters, but also of several faceless and epicene young men who also loiter about.
--John Simon, "Stealing Beauty," National Review, July 15, 1996
Then, feeling himself the cynosure of every eye in the library, he extemporized a brief speech on his "lucky day."
--Peter Schneider, Eduard's Homecoming
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 12-29-2005 08:28 AM
Rated G
quiddity \KWID-ih-tee\, noun:
1. The essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity of a thing.
2. A hairsplitting distinction; a trifling point; a quibble.
3. An eccentricity; an odd feature.
He wanted to capture not just live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state: their wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and the crow-ness of the crow.
--Thomas Nye, quoted in "Ted Hughes, 68, a Symbolic Poet And Sylvia Plath's Husband, Dies," New York Times, October 30, 1998
So far, I have tried to intimate, through meshed parallels and contrasts, something of the nature, the quiddity, of Japanese and of American literature.
--Ihab Hassan, "In the mirror of the sun: reflections on Japanese and American literature, Basho to Cage," World Literature Today, March 1, 1995
Boswell set biography a new ambition: capturing the copiousness and quiddity of a personality -- the self peculiarly revealed in odd quirks and, especially, in unpredictable, evanescent talk.
--John Mullan, "Dreaming up the Doctor," The Guardian, November 11, 2000
It is neither grammatical subtleties nor logical quiddities, nor the witty contexture of choice words or arguments and syllogisms, that will serve my turn.
--Michel de Montaigne, "Of Books"
She has looked after my interests with consummate skill, dealt with my quiddities and constantly kept up my spirits.
--John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination
I began . . . to give some thought to the memoir I had promised to write and wondered how I would go about it -- his freaks, quiddities, oddities, his eating, drinking, shaving, dressing and playfully savaging his students.
--Saul Bellow, Ravelstein
Quiddity comes from the scholastic Medieval Latin term quidditas, "essence," from quid, "what."
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 12-30-2005 06:53 AM
Rated G
perquisite \PUR-kwuh-zit\, noun:
1. A profit or benefit in addition to a salary or wages.
2. Broadly: The benefits of a position or office.
3. A gratuity or tip for services performed.
4. Anything to which someone has or claims the sole right.
In a tight market for skilled labor . . . corporations are increasingly buying homes for hot new hires -- a perquisite once reserved for top executives.
--Jennie James, "For Many Europeans, There's No Place Like Home," Time, May 8, 2000
It is a shock to find the master, whom we cannot help thinking of as the greatest gentleman in the history of art, regarding petty larceny as a perquisite of office and diverting the wages of sweepers and cleaners.
--Sir Lawrence Gowing, "Obsessed by Ambition, Saved by Art," New York Times, August 10, 1986
She is dressed in an inexpensive but stylish outfit, impeccably coordinated gloves, hat, shoes, and matching purse--the sole perquisite of her husband's hand-to-mouth pattern-cutting job in the ladies garment industry.
--Ann Druyan, "A New Sense of the Sacred," Humanist, November 2000
After having long been a narrowly aristocratic perquisite, the opportunity for adventurous cuisine was "democratized" in early modern, increasingly capitalistic Europe, by the spreading quest for upward social mobility, imperial service abroad, and thickening networks of social commerce.
--Robert Mccormick Adams, "Introduction: Case Histories," Social Research, Spring 1999
Perquisite derives from Medieval Latin perquisitum, from the past participle of Latin perquirere, "to search for eagerly," from per-, "through, thoroughly" + quaerere, "to seek." In Middle English it meant "property acquired by means other than inheritance." By 1565 it had acquired the sense "fringe benefit"; by 1721 it had also come to signify "a tip or gratuity."
Synonyms: benefit, fringe benefit, gravy, perk, reward.
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 12-31-2005 09:25 AM
Rated G
Hogmanay \hog-muh-NAY; HOG-muh-nay\, noun:
The name, in Scotland, for New Year's Eve, on which children go about singing and asking for gifts; also, a gift, cake, or treat given on New Year's Eve.
This is Hogmanay, the gifting of another year, the coming of midnight, the darkest hour, before the turn towards dawn.
--John F. Deane, "The music of what happens," Irish Times, December 28, 2000
The biggest celebration in Britain was in Edinburgh, where Hogmanay drew about 200,000 people to a free street party in the city centre.
--"Archbishop of Canterbury calls for greater generosity," Irish Times, Saturday, January 2, 1999
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 01-02-2006 03:56 PM
Rated G
Word of the Day
bloviate \BLOH-vee-ayt\, intransitive verb:
To speak or write at length in a pompous or boastful manner.
Anyone who has ever spent an idle morning watching the Washington talk shows has probably wondered: how did these people become entitled to earn six-figure salaries bloviating about the week's headlines?
--Robert Worth, "Quick! The Index!" New York Times, June 3, 2001
After five years as president and thirty years as a political figure, this colossal oaf is still unable to discipline his urge to . . . bloviate.
--R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., American Spectator, December 19, 1997
[W]e follow him minute by minute through a day in his office -- bloviating amiably with colleagues on the telephone, letting his secretary rewrite his clumsy letters and worrying about the possible hatred of his subordinates.
--John Brooks, "Fiction of the Managerial Class," New York Times, April 8, 1984
Bloviate is from blow + a mock-Latinate suffix -viate. Compare blowhard, "a boaster or braggart." Bloviation is the noun form; a bloviator is one who bloviates.
Trivia: Bloviate is most closely associated with U.S. President Warren G. Harding, who used it frequently and who was known for long, windy speeches. H.L. Mencken said of him, "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 01-03-2006 06:28 AM
Rated G
gastronome \GAS-truh-nohm\, noun:
A connoisseur of good food and drink.
If "poultry is for the cook what canvas is for a painter," to quote the 19th-century French gastronome Brillat-Savarin, why paint the same painting over and over again?
--John Willoughby and Chris Schlesinger, "From Poussin to Capon, a Chicken in Every Size," New York Times, September 22, 1999
Even though Paris was then considered the culinary capital of Europe, the food at the Cercle was so highly revered that many well-known gastronomes regularly made the trip to Lyon to eat there.
--Daniel Rogov, "Three culinary tales for Hanukka," Jerusalem Post, December 6, 1996
I am no gastronome at the best; moreover, I have, over the years, eaten in so many unpropitious circumstances and from so many truly awful kitchens that I have come to consider myself almost as much a connoisseur of bad food as other men are of good.
--James Cameron, "Albania: The Last Marxist Paradise," The Atlantic, June 1963
Gastronome is ultimately derived from Greek gaster,
"stomach" + nomos, "rule, law."
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 01-04-2006 06:31 AM
Rated G
sine qua non \sin-ih-kwah-NON; -NOHN; sy-nih-kway-\, noun:
An essential condition or element; an indispensable thing
Women's enfranchisement was crucial to them -- indeed, a sine qua non, since all other progress for which they worked, such as higher education and entrance into the professions, would be meaningless if women continued to be second-class citizens.
--Lillian Faderman, To Believe in Women
"Of the various attributes we fiction-writers require," he said, "one of the most important is detachment. Of course tenacity of purpose is the sine qua non, otherwise we'd never keep on with it for the year or two years or longer that it takes to finish the work."
--Barry Unsworth, Sugar and Rum
However we choose to define a classic, a sine qua non is that the material lend itself to reinterpretation in the light of changing circumstances.
--Matthew Gurewitsch, "A Country of Lesser Giants," New York Times, April 4, 1999
Sine qua non is from the Late Latin, literally "without which not."
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 01-05-2006 06:41 AM
Rated G
exegete \EK-suh-jeet\, noun:
A person who explains or interprets difficult parts of written works.
All the things said in this passage are clear and should be paid attention to, without an exegete interpreting.
--Galen, Commentary on Hippocrates' On the Nature of Man
He is far more a man of prayer, a witness, a confessor and a prophet, than a learned exegete and close thinking scholastic.
--Adolf Deissmann, St. Paul, A Study in Social and Religious History
Exegete is from Greek exegetes, from exegeisthai, "to interpret," and is related to exegesis.
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 01-06-2006 06:25 AM
Rated G
recondite \REK-uhn-dyt\, adjective:
1. Difficult to understand; abstruse.
2. Concerned with obscure subject matter.
And his fondness for stopping his readers short in their tracks with evidence of his recondite vocabulary is wonderfully irritating.
--"Books of the Times," New York Times, February 23, 1951
Among his playmates he counts the Italian novelist and semiotics professor Umberto Eco, whom he befriended 15 years ago when they engaged in a fierce ottava rima competition that lasted for weeks. They still trade complicated riddles and recondite guessing games by mail.
--"Roberto Benigni: The Funniest Italian You've Probably Never Heard Of," New York Times, October 11, 1998
He is a poet's poet, says another admirer, sometimes recondite and always deeply aware of the formal tradition of poetry.
--"Crown prince of puns to give the past new life," Irish Times, Saturday, May 22, 1999
Recondite is from Latin reconditus, past participle of recondere, "to store back," i.e., "out of the way," hence "to hide"; itself from re-, "back, again" + condere, "to put away, to store." Thus, recondite knowledge is "hidden" (because of obscurity or difficulty) from the understanding of the average person
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 01-07-2006 07:14 AM
Rated G
diktat \dik-TAHT\, noun:
1. A harsh settlement unilaterally imposed on a defeated party.
2. An authoritative decree or order.
Whether with the rapid reaction force or with the Bosnian government, the United States should vigorously support efforts to lift the siege of Sarajevo and help to piece back together a contiguous territory so that the Bosnian government can come to the bargaining table free of a Serbian diktat.
--"Why Bosnia matters," Commonweal, July 14, 1995
And it would begin to encroach on another, more treasured, freedom: the right of the networks to broadcast what they choose independent of government diktat.
--"Back to the smoke-filled room?" The Economist, February 25, 1995
Other important figures in the game said the problems would be better dealt with voluntarily than by diktat.
--Denis Campbell, "Fifa back Vieira," The Guardian, September 22, 2002
Employers weary of the dictatorial Aubry rejoiced on hearing Guigou describe her preference for debate over diktat and for "listening to people before speaking myself."
--Bruce Crumley, "Sitting Pretty," Time, November 13, 2000
His most cherished aim is to serve the Islamic government by giving people the right to choose it--a concept that is dangerously revolutionary to hard-liners who believe in imposing it by diktat.
--Scott MacLeod and Azadeh Moaveni, "Iran's New Revolutionary," Time, June 12, 2000
Diktat comes from German, from Latin dictatum, neuter past participle of dictare, "to dictate." It is related to dictator.
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Bob Maar
(Maar stands for Maartini)
Posts: 28608
From: New York City & Newport, RI
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 01-08-2006 06:17 AM
Rated G
esurient \ih-SUR-ee-uhnt; -ZUR-\, adjective:
Hungry; voracious; greedy.
The enemy then was an esurient Soviet Union which, having swallowed up Eastern Europe, had imposed a totalitarian system on countries just liberated from Nazism.
--Arnold Beichman, "As Truman envisioned our role," Washington Times, April 23, 2002
These new censors, the deconstructionists, take the most luscious and delicious apple and show it to a hungry person. They then seal the fruit with plastic wrap and demand that the esurient victim enjoy its flavour.
--Michael Coren, "Behold the deconstructionist, who liberates literature by confining it to a cult," Alberta Report, April 10, 1995
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