Category: Word of the Day

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Word of the Day – Liminal

  • Adjective: Liminal
    1. of, relating to, or situated at a sensory threshold : barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response liminal visual stimuli
    2. of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition : in-between, transitional … in the liminal state between life and death.
  • Synonyms:
    1. transitional
    2. changeover
    3. interim
    4. changing
    5. fluid
    6. in flux
    7. unsettled
    8. intermediate
    9. indistinguishable
    10. inappreciable
    11. imperceptible
  • Usage:
    1. “… and one I’m actually quite good at, hovering in the liminal space between sensitivity and paranoia.”
  • Encountered:
    1. Reading the essay Not Grumpy Cat in Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights: Essays

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day

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Word of the Day – Surfeit

  • Adjective: Surfeit

    1. an overabundant supply : excess
    2. an intemperate or immoderate indulgence in something (such as food or drink)
    3. disgust caused by excess
  • Synonyms:
    1. bellyful
    2. excess
    3. fat
    4. overabundance
    5. overage
    6. overflow
    7. overkill
    8. overmuch
    9. overplus
    10. oversupply
    11. plethora
    12. plus
    13. redundancy
    14. superabundance
    15. superfluity
    16. surplus
    17. surplusage
  • Usage:
    1. “I trembled to think of the ruined purses this day’s performances might result in. I could not help reflecting bodingly upon the intemperate zeal with which middle-aged men are apt to surfeit themselves upon a seductive folly which they have tasted for the first time. ”
  • Encountered:
    1. While reading Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad.

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day

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Word of the Day – Bougie

  • Adjective: Bougie

    1. informal + usually disparaging : marked by a concern for wealth, possessions, and respectability
    2. “Aspiring to be a higher class than one is. Derived from bourgeois – meaning middle/upper class, traditionally despised by communists.” So in modern-day English, someone who is bougie is creating an air of wealth or upper class status — whether it’s true or not.
  • Synonyms:
    1.  bourgeois
    2. pretender
    3. wanna-be
  • Usage:
    1. “Jesús and Marcella are so bougie they would drown if it rained.”
  • Encountered:
    1. Another student of my iTalki teacher in Guatemala had used this word with him. He asked if I knew what it meant.  Truth is I had never heard it before.  So I am learning English from my Spanish teacher.

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day

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Word of the Day – Screed

  • Noun: Screed

    1. a long speech or piece of writing, typically one regarded as tedious
    2. a leveled layer of material (e.g., cement) applied to a floor or other surface
  • Synonyms:
    1. rant
    2. harangue
    3. ranting
    4. diatribe
  • Usage:
    1. “Forgive me for turning today’s column into something between a personal rant and a screed, but in my highly unscientific personal experience playing golf recently, I’ve noticed an alarming uptick in a very annoying form of golf behavior. The most annoying golf behavior, perhaps.”
  • Encountered:
    1. While reading an Internet article: Attention golfers: Stop making this really annoying mistake on the golf course

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day

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Word of the Day – Croquis

  • Noun: Croquis
    1.  a rough draft
  • Synonyms: (Being a stolen French word in specialized use in the art world, not many English synonyms found)
    1. sketch
    2. line drawing
    3. cartoon???
    4. under-drawing
  • Usage:
    1. “But what’s your ultimate goal, you’ll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting…”
  • Encountered:
    1. While reading a didactic wall panel at the Beyond Van Gogh exhibit here is St. Louis

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day

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Word of the Day – Parvenu

  • Noun: Parvenu

    1. a person who has suddenly risen to a higher economic status but has not gained social acceptance of others in that class
  • Synonyms:
    1.  upstart
    2. nouveau riche
  • Usage:
    1. “’I brought the old guys so that my drives look that much longer,’ Watson joked. But we prodded. No, really, what’s the deal? Nothing against these guys, but most tour pros are surrounded by agents, managers, instructors, equipment reps, siblings, former college teammates and general parvenus. (Some pros have enough lackeys to field a softball team.)”
  • Encountered:
    1. While reading an Internet article: What would a tour pro shoot at your course? Bubba Watson helps us find out

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day

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Word of the Day – Exogamy

  • Noun: Exogamy

    1. marriage outside of a specific group especially as required by custom or law
  • Synonyms:
    1. marriage
    2. wedlock
    3. spousal
    4. relationship
    5. intermarriage
    6. matrimony
    7. union
  • Usage:
    1. “’Most societies,’ she went on, ‘practice both exogamy and endogamy–a man must marry outside his family but inside his nation, race, religion, or some large group, and you Free Traders are no exception; you must cross to another moiety but you can’t marry fraki.'”
  • Encountered:
    1. While reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy.

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day

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Word of the Day – Parkour

  • Noun: Parkour
    1. the activity or sport of moving rapidly through an area, typically in an urban environment, negotiating obstacles by running, jumping, and climbing
  • Synonyms:
    1.  none found… that were consistent with the definition
  • Usage:
    1. “Runners are the messengers of the future who practice parkour to deliver underground messages to revolutionary factions in the city. Free Running is an exercise/sports game based on the Parkour urban game where athletes use their surroundings to maneuver around areas.”
  • Encountered:
    1. My sadistic spouse, the Mistress Robin, for Christmas gave poor little old OCD me a daily calendar of puzzles, well knowing that I could not let them go unsolved, thus driving me stark raving mad.  Fortunately most of the puzzles are reasonably simple.  The one for April 6th was a puzzle  of word fragments that resulted in 20 words with a sports theme.  I was down to par and kour, either order did not make sense to me so I peeked at the answer.  I then had to look up the definition of parkour.  I have learned something new, I can go home now?

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Word of the Day – Phratry

  • Noun: Phratry

    1. a kinship group forming a subdivision of a Greek phyle
    2. a tribal subdivision specifically : an exogamous group typically comprising several totemic clans
  • Synonyms:
    1.  sept
    2. lineage
    3. kinfolk
    4. pedigree
    5. blood line
  • Usage:
    1. “You people call yourselves a ‘family’ but the grouping is a phratry.“
  • Encountered:
    1. While reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy.

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day

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Word of the Day – Epexegesis

  • Noun: Epexegesis — Adverb: Epexegetically
    1. additional explanation or explanatory matter
  • Synonyms:
    1. annotation
    2. comment
    3. commentary
    4. gloss
  • Usage:

“’For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored just this purpose.

‘Where?’

‘In the word-memory section,’ he said, epexegetically.

  • Encountered:
    1. While reading the short story, The Great Automatic Grammatizator by Ronald Dahl.

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day