| word of the day |
[Jun. 6th, 2006|09:19 pm] |
The Word of the Day for June 6 is:
bedizen \bih-DYE-zen\ verb
: to dress or adorn gaudily
Example sentence:
"Adorned by minarets and spires and bedizened by more than a
million lights, Coney Island embodied what has been called the 'architecture
of exhilaration.'" (Blaine Harden, _New York Times_, August 28, 1999)
Did you know?
"Bedizen" doesn't have the flashy history you might expect -- its
roots lie in the rather quiet art of spinning thread. In times past,
the spinning process began with the placement of fibers (such as flax) on
an implement called a "distaff"; the fibers were then drawn out from
the distaff and twisted into thread. "Bedizen" descends from the verb
"disen," which meant "to dress a distaff with flax" and which came to
English by way of Middle Dutch. The spelling of "disen" eventually became
"dizen," and its meaning expanded to cover the "dressing up" of things
other than distaffs. In the mid-17th century, English speakers began
using "bedizen" with the same meaning. |
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| word of the day |
[Jun. 4th, 2006|08:46 pm] |
The Word of the Day for June 4 is:
caesura \sih-ZYUR-uh\ noun
1 : a break in the flow of sound usually in the middle of a line
of verse
*2 : break, interruption
3 : a pause marking a rhythmic point of division in a melody
Example sentence:
"Without so much as the caesura of a drawn breath I was first
shouting in joy, then screaming in shock." (E.L. Doctorow, _World's Fair_)
Did you know?
Caesuras (or caesurae) are those slight pauses one makes as one
reads verse. While it may seem that their most obvious role is to
emphasize the metrical construction of the verse, more often we need these
little stops (which may be, but are not necessarily, set off by
punctuation) to introduce the cadence and phrasing of natural speech into the
metrical scheme. The word "caesura," borrowed from Late Latin, is
ultimately from Latin "caedere" meaning "to cut." Nearly as old as the
450-year-old poetry senses is the general meaning "a break or |
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| The Word of the Day for June 2 is: |
[Jun. 2nd, 2006|02:06 pm] |
The Word of the Day for June 2 is:
foodie \FOO-dee\ noun
: a person having an avid interest in the latest food fads
Example sentence:
A serious foodie, Beryl reads cookbooks like novels and scours
specialty shops in search of exotic ingredients.
Did you know?
"Foodie" is a relatively recent addition to our language (dating
from the early 1980s), but it derives from a much older word, "food,"
which has been with us for as long as there has been anything that could
be called English. "Food" can be traced back through Middle English to
the Old English form "foda," which is itself related to Old High German
"fuotar," meaning "food" or "fodder," and Latin "panis," meaning
"bread." "Panis" is the source for "empanada," a Spanish turnover with a
sweet filling, "panatela," a type of cigar, "panettone," an Italian bread
containing raisins and candied fruit, and "pantry," a room used for the
storage of provisions. |
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