WORD OF THE DAY..........courtesy of Dictionary.com

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hirtellous \hur-TEL-uhs\, verb:
 
Minutely hirsute.
 
Any noticeable hirsute or even hirtellous shadings visible upon the represented, unclothed, female form, anywhere below the eyebrows, say, is, in the judgment of this Department…
 -- Frank Yerby, Tobias and the Angel
 
A small annual herb commonly 20 to 40 cm. tall, sparingly branched above, hirtellous on the stems with small downwardly curled hairs…
 -- Carnegie Institution of Washington, Botany of the Maya Area
 
Hirtellous comes from the Latin word hirt meaning "hairy." The suffix -ellus is a diminutive adjective suffix.

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tardigrade \TAHR-di-greyd\, adjective:
 
1. Slow in pace or movement.
 2. Belonging or pertaining to the phylum Tardigrada.

noun:
 1. Also called bear animalcule, water bear. Any microscopic, chiefly herbivorous invertebrate of the phylum Tardigrada, living in water, on mosses, lichens, etc.
 
The days were long and boring as we walked a continuous almost tardigrade pace around several large buildings, again with empty carbines.
 -- Stafford O. Chenevert, Amber Waves of Grain
 
…the soldiers were struggling and fighting their way after them, in such tardigrade fashion as their hoof-shaped shoes would allow—impeded, but not very resolutely attacked, by the people.
 -- George Eliot, Romola
 
He rolls tardigrade, to a stop on a shoulder, stooped in sand, in its pretense as it doesn't exist and there's only desert…
 -- Joshua Cohen, Witz
 
Related to the common word tardy, tardigrade comes from the Latin word tardigradus meaning "slow-paced."

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apophasis \uh-POF-uh-sis\, noun:
 
Denial of one's intention to speak of a subject that is at the same time named or insinuated, as “I shall not mention Caesar's avarice, nor his cunning, nor his morality.”
 
But I think that anything that is deep isn't love, it's deliberate calculation or schizophrenia. I myself wouldn't even attempt to say what love is - probably both love and God can only be defined by apophasis, through those things that they are not.
 -- Viktor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
 
"…Now, I have no desire to be a backseat driver—” Apophasis, Chris thought; saying you're not going to say something in order to say it. Nixon's favorite device, and Newt Gingrich's, and Karl Rove's—fine old Republican tradition.
 -- John Barnes, Directive 51
 
Apophasis stems from the Greek word apópha meaning "to say no, deny." The suffix -sis appears in Greek loanwords, where it forms an abstract noun from a verb, as in thesis

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catachresis \kat-uh-KREE-sis\, noun:
 
Misuse or strained use of words, as in a mixed metaphor, occurring either in error or for rhetorical effect.
 
This monstrous metaphor should more aptly be called a catachresis, an extravagant, unexpected figure, and we might be tempted to dismiss it as abusive misstatement. But neither the catachresis nor the monster can simply be dismissed…
 -- Richard L. Regosin, Montaigne's Unruly Brood
 
Analepsis, catachresis, no: the word she was after was “floundering." She could already write the review of her unwritten book: “lwlarina Thwaite flounders about in her subject. with little direction and still less progress.“
 -- Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children
 
Catachresis is derived from the Greek root chrêsis which meant "to use." The prefix cata- means "down, back, against." The word katachrêsthai meant "to misuse" in Greek.
 

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anacoluthon \an-uh-kuh-LOO-thon\, noun:
 
1. A construction involving a break in grammatical sequence, as It makes me so—I just get angry.
 2. An instance of anacoluthia.
 
She employed, not from any refinement of style, but in order to correct her imprudences, abrupt breaches of syntax not unlike that figure which the grammarians call anacoluthon or some such name.
 -- Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past
 
Sometimes there is no main verb at all, or the sentence is an anacoluthon, beginning in one way and ending in another.
 -- Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
 
Anacoluthon has a very literal meaning in Greek. The root kolouth- meant "march." However this root has two prefixes. First, the prefix a- means "together." The

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litotes \LAHY-tuh-teez\, noun:
 
Understatement, especially that in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary, as in “not bad at all.”
 
Stevens does not allow himself much of the Sublime here, yet it creeps in by negation in the litotes or understatement of the stanza's close.
 -- Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate
 
I know it's a textbook example of what lit-crit geeks like to call litotes, a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed through the negation of its opposite…
 -- Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts
 
Litotes comes from the Greek word lītótēs which meant "plainness, simplicity."

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zeugma \ZOOG-muh\, noun:
 
The use of a word to modify or govern two or more words when it is appropriate to only one of them or is appropriate to each but in a different way, as in to wage war and peace or On his fishing trip, he caught three trout and a cold.
 
Of course, the zeugma is not an eighteenth-century invention, but it was not handled before then with such neatness and consciousness, and had not the same air of being the normal process of thought.
 -- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
 
If we take "We will be proud of course the air will be" as a strong syntactical unit, a complete sentence, the parallelism of "we will be" and "the air will be" draws both these auxiliary phrases toward the yoke (or zeugma, in rhetorical parlance) of the main verb phrase.
 -- Cary Nelson, Ed Folsom, W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry
 
Zeugma stems from the Greek word of the same spelling which meant "a yoking."

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crasis \KREY-sis\, noun:
 
Composition; constitution; makeup.
 
Here they are bathed in the waters of oblivion until they retain no memory of the scenes through which they have passed; but they still preserve their original crasis and capacity.
 -- Tobias George Smollett, Adventures of an Atom
 
This is all that ever staggered my faith in regard to Yorick's extraction, who, by what I can remember of him, and by all the accounts I could ever get of him, seemed not to have had one single drop of Danish blood in his whole crasis…
 -- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
 
Crasis is derived from the Greek word krâsis which meant "mixture, blend."

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Re: Notes for Janice!!

« Reply #785 on: Yesterday at 02:12 pm »





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draggle \DRAG-uhl\, verb:
 
1. To soil by dragging over damp ground or in mud.
 2. To trail on the ground; be or become draggled.
 3. To follow slowly; straggle.
 
No skirts to hold up, or to draggle their wet folds against my ankles; no stifling veil flapping in my face, and blinding my eyes; no umbrella to turn inside out, but instead, the cool rain driving slap into my face…
 -- Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall and Other Writing
 
You can't run through the streets after the water baths in that thing you draggle around the house.
 -- Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Anya
 
Draggle is obviously related to this more common word drag. It entered English in the late 1400s. The suffix -le is a verb formation from Middle English, also seen in dazzle and twinkle, among others


*i never used the word draggled before..  I always thought the term to be bedraggle.. or bedraggled.  I suppose it is all the same thing?  Maybe the difference is that you are draggled, in behavior?  Then bedraggled in appearance.  It is a difference in tense.    Perhaps self assessment, opposite
someone else making the assessment?  Anyway it has given me pause.
 

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versicolor \VUR-si-kuhl-er\, adjective:
 
1. Changeable in color: versicolor skies.
 2. Of various colors; parti-colored: a versicolor flower arrangement.
 
The three large versicolor flowers opened up with a silky slap…
 -- Boris Vian, Foam of the Daze
 
The versicolor glow of the Algeron Effect, just a few hundred thousand kilometers from the space station, angled through the viewing port and stippled the far wall.
 -- David R. George III, Serpents Among the Ruins
 
Versicolor comes from the Latin roots vers meaning "to turn" and color. It entered English in the 1620s