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word | 1 Dec 2003 06:59

comestible

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The Word of the Day for December 1 is:

comestible   \kuh-MESS-tuh-bul\   adjective
     : edible

Example sentence:
     The magazine's December issue features recipes for roast 
goose, plum pudding, gingerbread, and other comestible treats 
for the holidays.

Did you know? 
     Did you expect "comestible" to be a noun meaning "food"? 
You're probably not alone. As it happens, "comestible" is used 
both as an adjective and a noun. The adjective is by far the 
older of the two; it has been part of English since at least the 
1400s. (In fact, one of its earliest known uses was in a text 
printed in 1483 by William Caxton, the man who established 
England's first printing press.) The noun (which is most often 
used in the plural form, "comestibles") dates only from 1837. It 
made its first appearance in a novel in which a character 
fortified himself with "a strong reinforcement of comestibles."
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word | 2 Dec 2003 06:59

bathetic

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William Bradford helped draft the Mayflower Compact. 
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The Word of the Day for December 2 is: 

bathetic   \buh-THEH-tik\   adjective
     1 : extremely commonplace or trite
    *2 : characterized by insincere or overdone pathos : 
excessively sentimental

Example sentence:
     The movie is a bathetic weeper, one that all but the most 
maudlin and sentimental viewers will find overly dramatic and 
unbelievable.

Did you know?
     When English speakers turned "apathy" into "apathetic" in 
the 1700s, using the suffix "-etic" to turn the noun into the 
adjective, they modeled it on "pathetic," the adjectival form 
of  "pathos" from Greek "pathetikos." People also applied that 
bit of linguistic transformation to coin "bathetic." In the mid-
19th century, English speakers added the suffix "-etic" 
to "bathos," the Greek word for "depth," which has been used in 
English since the early 1700s and means "triteness" 
or "excessive sentimentalism." The result: the ideal adjective 
for the incredibly commonplace or the overly sentimental.
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word | 3 Dec 2003 06:59

gam

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The Word of the Day for December 3 is:

gam   \GAM\   verb
     intransitive sense  : to engage in a gam
     transitive senses 1 : to have a gam with
    *2 : to spend or pass (as time) talking

Example sentence:
     The two strangers discovered that they had a lot in common 
as they gammed the hours away on the long train ride.

Did you know?
     "But what is a gam? You might wear out your index-finger 
running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find 
the word." So says the narrator, who calls himself Ishmael, of 
Herman Melville's _Moby Dick_. We imagine you are also wondering 
what a gam is, and you're in luck, for you will indeed 
find "gam" entered in dictionaries today. _Merriam-Webster's 
Collegiate Dictionary_ defines the noun "gam" as "a visit or 
friendly conversation at sea or ashore especially between 
whalers." (It can also mean "a school of whales.") Melville's 
narrator explains that when whaling ships met far out at sea, 
they would hail one another and the crews would exchange visits 
and news. English speakers have been using the word "gam" to
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word | 4 Dec 2003 06:59

picayune

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The Word of the Day for December 4 is:

picayune   \pih-kee-YOON\   adjective
     : of little value : paltry; also : petty, small-minded

Example sentence:
     "I could voice some picayune complaints," said Dana, "but 
for the most part I have been satisfied with the company's 
products and services."

Did you know? 
     In the 19th century, in Louisiana and other southern 
states, a picayune was a small copper coin (specifically, a 
Spanish half real) with a low monetary value. The coin's name 
derives from "picaioun," a word that means "small coin" in 
Occitan (a language spoken in Southern France). It ultimately 
derives from the Occitan word "pica," which means "to jingle" 
and which was created to mimic the sound of coins jingling. The 
real as a monetary unit fell out of use, however, and "picayune" 
joined "two bits" in the category of small amounts of money 
whose name eventually came to be used instead for things that 
are paltry and small.
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word | 5 Dec 2003 06:59

soupcon

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The Word of the Day for December 5 is:

soupcon   \soup-SAWNG (the "NG" is not actually pronounced, but 
the final vowel is nasalized)\   noun
     : a little bit : trace

Example sentence:
     Actor Sean Connery's on-screen portrayal of James Bond was, 
in the words of the _San Francisco Examiner_ (July 31, 1987), 
distinguished by "a dash of grit and a soupcon of self-satire."

Did you know?
     Culinary enthusiasts may think "soupcon" originated with a 
dash of garlic in the coq au vin or a splash of vanilla in the 
creme anglaise, but the etymology of the word has more to do 
with inklings and suspicions than with food. Sometime in the 
18th century, English speakers borrowed "soupcon" from the 
French, who were using the word to mean "hint," "trace," 
or "suspicion." The Old French form of the word was "sospecon," 
which in turn comes from the Latin forms "suspection-" 
and "suspectio." Etymologists have further traced the word's 
Latin ancestry to the verb "suspicere," meaning "to 
suspect." "Suspicere," as you might expect, is also the source 
of the English words "suspect" and "suspicion."
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word | 6 Dec 2003 06:59

shibboleth

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The Word of the Day for December 6 is:

shibboleth   \SHIH-buh-luth\   noun
    1 *a : a catchword or slogan used by members of a group but 
regarded by others as empty of real meaning  b : a commonly held 
belief
     2 : a behavior or use of language that identifies a person 
as belonging to a group

Example sentence:
     Alice urged voters to ignore the political shibboleths put 
forth by her opponent.

Did you know?
     The Bible's Book of Judges (12:4-6) tells the story of the 
Ephraimites, who, after they were routed by the Gileadite army, 
tried to retreat by sneaking across a ford of the Jordan River 
that was held by their enemy. The Gileadites, wary of the ploy, 
asked every soldier who tried to cross if he was an Ephraimite. 
When the soldier said "no," he was asked to say "shibboleth" 
(which means "stream" in Hebrew). Gileadites pronounced the 
word "shibboleth," but Ephraimites said "sibboleth." Anyone who 
left out the initial "sh" was killed on the spot. When English 
speakers first borrowed "shibboleth," they used it to mean "test
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word | 7 Dec 2003 06:59

adventitious

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The Word of the Day for December 7 is:

adventitious  \ad-ven-TIH-shuhs\  adjective
   *1 : coming from another source and not inherent or innate  
     2 : arising or occurring sporadically or in other than the 
usual location

Example sentence:
     "Unlike most historic houses in the city, it's all of a 
piece, with no adventitious intrusions and no supplemental 
period pieces." (Hudson Bridges, _Gourmet_, December 1989)

Did you know?
     "Adventitious" is an adventitious word: it comes to English 
from the Latin "adventicius," meaning "coming from outside." 
This, in turn, comes from "adventus," the past participle of the 
verb "advenire," meaning "to arrive" or "to happen." That verb 
is also a source of several other English words, 
including "advent" (which, in its uncapitalized form, can refer 
to any coming or arrival), "adventure" (a word whose earliest 
sense was "chance happening"), and "avenue" (a means of arrival).

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
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word | 8 Dec 2003 06:59

farraginous

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The Word of the Day for December 8 is:

farraginous   \fuh-RAJ-uh-nuss\   adjective
     : consisting of a confused mixture : formed of various 
materials in no fixed order or arrangement

Example sentence:
     "There are stray stories, or semi-stories, in my three 
farraginous collections of mostly non-fictional prose." (John 
Updike, _Sunday Times_, Jan. 8, 1995)

Did you know?
     In Latin, the stem "farragin-" and the noun "farrago" both 
mean "mixture" or (specifically) "a mixture of grains for cattle 
feed." They derive from "far," the Latin name for spelt, a type 
of grain. In the 1600s, English speakers began using "farrago" 
as a noun meaning "hodgepodge" (we've featured this word as a 
Word of the Day in the past) and "farraginous" as an adjective 
meaning "consisting of a medley." The creation of the adjective 
was simply a matter of adding the adjectival suffix "-ous" 
to "farragin-" (although at least one writer had previously 
experimented with "farraginary," employing a different 
adjectival suffix).
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word | 9 Dec 2003 06:59

coeval

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The Word of the Day for December 9 is:

coeval   \koh-EE-vul\   adjective
     : of the same or equal age, antiquity, or duration

Example sentence: 
     Carbon dating determined that the fossils were 
approximately coeval.

Did you know? 
     "Coeval" comes to English from the Latin word "coaevus," 
meaning "of the same age." "Coaevus" was formed by combining 
the "co-" prefix ("in or to the same degree") with the 
Latin "aevum" ("age" or "lifetime"). The root "ev" comes 
from "aevum," making words such as "longevity," "medieval," 
and "primeval" all near relations to "coeval." Although "coeval" 
can technically describe any two or more entities that coexist, 
it is most typically used to refer to things that have existed 
together for a very long time (such as galaxies) or that were 
concurrent with each other in the distant past (parallel 
historical periods of ancient civilizations, for example).
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word | 10 Dec 2003 06:59

clew

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The Word of the Day for December 10 is:

clew   \KLOO\   noun
     1 : a ball of thread, yarn, or cord 
    *2  : clue 
     3 a : a lower corner or only the after corner of a sail  
b : a metal loop attached to the lower corner of a sail  c 
plural : a combination of lines by which a hammock is suspended

Example sentence:
     "They had followed immediately behind him, thinking his 
actions might prove a clew to my whereabouts...." (Edgar Rice 
Burroughs, _A Princess of Mars_)

Did you know? 
     The "ball of thread" meaning of "clew" (from Middle 
English "clewe" and ultimately from Old English "cliewen") has 
been with us since before the 12th century. The variant "clue" 
had come into use by the 16th century. Because balls of thread 
were used to escape from labyrinths in various mythological 
stories (such as the story of Theseus in Crete), "clew" 
and "clue" came to be used of anything that could guide a person 
through a difficult place. This use led in turn to the 
meaning "a piece of evidence that leads one toward the solution
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Gmane