word of the day
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Word of the Day: Esemplasy
(n.); unification; to make into one; the unifying power of imagination; accredited to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) “Austen is far from superficial … Her books are intimate and compelling. She has a voice that somehow seems to chime even with…
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Word of the Day: Didascalic
(adj.); intended to teach; related to teaching or education “How did it come to be … that ‘those of us for whom English is a line of work are also called upon to love literature and ensue that others do…
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Word of the Day: Nescient
(adj.); absence of knowledge or awareness; ignorance; from Late Latin ne (“not”) + sciential (“knowledge”) “Prejudice is the child of ignorance.” –William Hazlitt, from his essay “On Prejudice.” There is any number of cliches to draw upon when describing ignorance.…
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Word of the Day: Antithalian
(adj.); opposed to mirth, festivity, or fun “For many of us, these systems provided a foundation for our childhood and opened the door to vast electronic worlds to explore, hack, experiment, and fail within. They taught us how to learn,…
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Word of the Day: Agacerie
(n.); allurement, enticement, coquetry; flirtation; from the French agacer (“to tease”) Fictional characters – unlike the messy organisms from which they derive – float free from the sordid contingencies of the body, because, no matter how convincingly they’re portrayed as…
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Word of the Day: Excogitate
(v.); to think out, devise or invent; to study intently in order to fully comprehend; from the Latin ex (“out of”) + co (“together”) + agitare (“to turn over”) “Many authors dream of a happy ending in which, having delivered…
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Word of the Day: Suppalpation
(n); gaining affection by caressing; the act of enticing by soft words; from the Latin suppalpari (“to caress a little”) Simply put, written English is great for puns but terrible for learning to read or write. It’s like making children…
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Word of the Day: Euonymous
(adj.); having a well or suitable name From Dickens with his bitter Gradgrind to J. K. Rowling with her sour Voldemort, authors have long understood that names help establish character. —Neal Gabler, from “The Weird Science of Naming Things” A rose…
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Word of the Day: Anopisthographic
(adj.); inscribed only on one side; c. 1870-75 “As literary quarrels go, [Boisrobert’s denunciation of Homer] was a particularly good one, because it wasn’t really about technique but about the quality of ideas, about the relationship between knowledge and innovation,…
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Word of the Day: Silvicide
(n.); a special pesticide intended for killing unwanted trees and other brush It was the kind of horrific end no one could have imagined for the demure Harkey matriarch … her death represented the final, sordid unraveling of one of…
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Word of the Day: Ubeity
(n.); the condition or quality of being in a place, of being located or situated; whereness or ubication; from the Latin ubi (“where”) “I love repetition. I love doing the same thing at the same time and in the same…
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Word of the Day: Atrabilious
(adj.); gloomy, morose, or morbid; bad-tempered, irritable; from the Latin agra bili(s) (“black bile”) “Caleb stopped, massaged, then stopped again, as though he felt something under the skin. ‘Too big to be a morphine pump,’ he said cheerfully. At 32…