Word of the Day - Dictionary.com (moral, Messiah, blood)

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Word of the Day for Wednesday August 4, 2004

conflate \kuhn-FLAYT\, transitive verb:
1. To bring together; to fuse together; to join or meld.
2. To combine (as two readings of a text) into one whole.

Scott Reynolds's creepy debut feature [film] conflates the present and the past with ingenious use of flashbacks.
--Anne Billson, "Bent beneath the weight of its own righteousness," Sunday Telegraph, March 1, 1998

Painting America as a drug-ridden society leads to bad policy -- as does the tendency in some quarters to conflate the various drug abuses into a single dreadful statistic.
--William Raspberry, "Not a Drug-Ridden Society," Washington Post, April 21, 2000

. . . lean and mobile military units that conflate the traditional categories of police officers, commandos, emergency-relief specialists, diplomats, and, of course, intelligence officers.
--Robert D. Kaplan, "The roles of the CIA and the military may merge," The Atlantic, February 1998

[Pah]

The Word of the Day for August 4 is:

disparage • \di-SPAIR-ij\ • verb
1 : to lower in rank or reputation : degrade
*2 : to speak slightingly about : belittle

Example sentence:
Several respected scientists have disparaged the authors of the study for using sloppy methods.

Did you know?
In Middle English, to "disparage" someone meant causing that person to marry someone of inferior rank. "Disparage" derives from the Anglo-French "desparager," meaning "to marry below one’s class." "Desparager," in turn, combines the negative prefix "des-" with "parage"("equality" or "lineage"), which itself comes from "per," meaning "peer." The original "marriage" sense of "disparage" is now obsolete, but a closely-related sense ("to lower in rank or reputation") survives in modern English. By the 16th century, English speakers (including Shakespeare) were also using "disparage" to mean simply "to belittle."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

[Pah]

The Webster Word of the Day for September 4 is:

transmogrify • \transs-MAH-gruh-fye\ • verb
: to change or alter greatly and often with grotesque or humorous effect

Example sentence:
The movie's central character finds an odd-looking pair of glasses and is transmogrified into a heroic crime-fighter when he puts them on.

Did you know?
We know that the prefix "trans-" means "across" or "beyond" and appears in many words that evoke change, such as "transform" and "transpire," but we don't know the exact origins of "transmogrify." The 17th-century dramatist, novelist, and poet Aphra Behn, who is regarded as England's first female professional writer, was among the first English authors to use the word. In her 1671 comic play The Amorous Prince Behn wrote, "I wou'd Love would transmogriphy me to a maid now." A century later, Scottish poet Robert Burns plied the word again in verse, aptly capturing the grotesque and sometimes humorous effect of transmogrification: "Social life and Glee sit down, . . . Till, quite transmugrify'd, they're grown Debauchery and Drinking."

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Dictionary.com Word of the Day for Saturday September 4, 2004
bricolage \bree-koh-LAHZH; brih-\, noun:
Construction or something constructed by using whatever materials happen to be available.

The Internet is a global bricolage, lashing together unthinkable complexities of miscellaneous computers with temporary lengths of phone line and fiber optic, bits of Ethernet cable and strings of code.
--Bernard Sharratt, "Only Connected," New York Times, December 17, 1995

Cooking with leftovers was bricolage--a dialogue between the cook and the available materials.
--Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash

I point out to my students that no one ever really reads Hamlet for the first time now; we've heard it all before in bits and pieces, cultural bricolage.
--Marjorie Garber, "Back to Whose Basics?" New York Times, October 29, 1995

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Sorry there's been such a gap - I'll try to fix that in the future.

pah

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From Wordsmith.org
garth (garth) noun

A small yard surrounded by a cloister. Also known as cloister garth.

[From Middle English, from Old Norse (garthr) yard. Ultimately from Indo-European root gher- (to enclose or grasp) that is also the ancestor of such words as court, orchard, kindergarten, French jardin (garden), choir, courteous, Hindi gherna (to surround), yard, and horticulture.]

"The St. Joseph's Abbey bell tower dominates the view looking out across the garth." Bradford L. Miner; Heeding the Call Abbey Opens Doors to Prospective Monks; Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, Massachusetts); Mar 11, 2001.

"In this respect it might be noted that in 1457 the Westminster cloister garth was scythed three times, giving some indication that grass would have been able to grow to some considerable length." Jan Woudstra and James Hitchmough; The Enamelled Mead; Landscape Research (Abingdon, UK); Mar 2000.

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Word of the Day for Sunday September 5, 2004 Dictionary.com
malodorous \mal-OH-duhr-uhs\, adjective:
Having a bad odor.

Working inside this tomb means coming to terms with rock falls, malodorous dust and faulty electrical supplies.
--John Ray, "Splendid Digs," New York Times, October 18, 1998

But people were accustomed to the odors of chamber pots and outdoor privies and to the stench of manure on city streets as well as in the country. Even the most refined could scarcely have been squeamish about malodorous garbage.
--Susan Strasser, Waste and Want

[Pah]

The Webster Word of the Day for September 5 is:

zeitgeber • \TSYTE-gay-ber\ • noun
: an environmental agent or event (as the occurrence of light or dark) that provides the stimulus setting or resetting a biological clock of an organism

Example sentence:
Light is known to be a zeitgeber that helps to keep both plants and animals on their normal daily and seasonal schedules.

Did you know?
Zeitgebers are nature's alarm clocks—both biologically and etymologically. The word "zeitgeber" derives from a combination of two German terms, "Zeit," which means "time," and "Geber," which means "giver," so a "zeitgeber" is literally a "time giver." In nature, zeitgebers tend to be cyclic or reoccurring patterns that help keep the body's circadian rhythms operating in an orderly way. For plants and animals, the daily pattern of light and darkness and the warmer and colder temperatures between day and night serve as zeitgebers, cues that keep organisms functioning on a regular schedule. For humans, societally imposed cycles, such as the schedule of the work or school day and regular mealtimes, can become zeitgebers as well.

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A.Word.A.Day--gulosity from Wordsmith.org

gulosity (gyoo-LOS-i-tee) noun

Gluttony; greediness.

[From Late Latin gulositas, from Latin gulosus (gluttonous), from gula (gullet, gluttony).]

"He (Shakespeare) did not drink much ... it is doubtful whether he ate much either. There is gulosity in Ben Jonson's plays, but no slavering in Will's." Anthony Burgess; Shakespeare; Carroll & Graf Publishers; 2002.

"The result of my holiday gulosity impacted upon me one night at a Santa Monica restaurant called Rix. The owner had stopped by to chat and was discussing a live jellyfish he planned on placing in a tank as part of the restaurant's decor. I was in a comatose state and when I heard jellyfish I said, 'Sure, I'll try it, just a small bite.'" Al Martinez; Eat, Eat, Eat, Drink, Eat, Chat, Drink, Eat, Eat; The Los Angeles Times; Dec 22, 1999.

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The Webster Word of the Day for September 6 is:

travail \truh-VAIL\ noun
1 a : work especially of a painful or laborious nature :
toil b : a physical or mental exertion or piece of work : task,
effort *c : agony, torment
2 : labor, parturition

Example sentence:
"Increasingly, African-American women writers are telling
of the specific travails that that history imposed upon their
foremothers." (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, _Oxford Review_, February
1992)

Did you know?
Etymologists are pretty certain that "travail" comes
from "trepalium," the Late Latin name of an instrument of
torture. We don't know exactly what a "trepalium" looked like,
but the word's history gives us an idea. "Trepalium" is derived
from the Latin "tripalis," which means "having three stakes"
(from "tri-," meaning "three," and "palus," meaning "stake").
From "trepalium" sprang the Anglo-French verb "travailler,"
which originally meant "to torment" but eventually acquired the
milder senses "to labor" and "to journey." The shift in meaning
from "torment" to "journey" gives us an idea of what people once
thought about travel: it was torture. The Anglo-French
noun "travail" was borrowed into English in the 13th century,
followed about a century later by "travel," another descendant
of "travailler."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.