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WORD OF THE DAY..........courtesy of Dictionary.com
ifyoucantfixit:
quail \kweyl\, verb:
To lose heart or courage in difficulty or danger; shrink with fear.
She would have quailed in the same way if the armored bear had looked at her like that, because there was something not unlike Lorek in Will's eyes, young as they were.
-- Phillip Pullman, The Subtle Knife
I should have quailed in the absence of moonlight, for it was by the leading of stars only I traced the dim path; I should have quailed still more in the unwonted presence of that which tonight shone in the north, a moving mystery—the Aurora Borealis.
-- Charlotte Brontë, Villette
The verb quail is not related to the more common noun. It comes from the Middle Dutch word quelen meaning "to suffer, be ill." This sense of "to cower" was rare until the late 1800s
ifyoucantfixit:
coetaneous \koh-i-TEY-nee-uhs\, adjective:
Of the same age or duration.
Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts: they will one day be members, and obey one will.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays
We could say that all living people are contemporaneous but not necessarily coetaneous; they live at different age levels.
-- Harold C. Raley, A Watch Over Mortality
Coetaneous stems from the Latin roots co- meaning "with, together with," ætat- meaning "age," and the suffix -aneus (which is an adjectival suffix meaning "resembling
ifyoucantfixit:
diapason \dahy-uh-PEY-zuhn\, noun:
1. A full, rich outpouring of melodious sound.
2. The compass of a voice or instrument.
3. A fixed standard of pitch.
4. Either of two principal timbres or stops of a pipe organ, one of full, majestic tone (open diapason) and the other of strong, flutelike tone (stopped diapason).
5. Any of several other organ stops.
6. A tuning fork.
During the whole interval in which he had produced those diapason blasts, heard with such inharmonious feelings by the three auditors outside the screen, his thoughts had wandered wider than his notes in conjectures on the character and position of the gentleman seen in Ethelberta's company.
-- Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta
And so those two, angry accuser and indifferent accused, faced each other for a moment; while, incessant, dull, might, the thunders of the great cataract mingled with the trembling diapason of the stupendous turbines in the rock-hewn caverns where old Niagara now toiled in fetters, to swell their power and fling gold into their bottomless coffers.
-- George Allan England, The Air Trust
Diapason was originally an abbreviation of the Greek phrase "hē dià pāsôn chordôn symphōnía" which meant "the concord through all the notes of the scale."
ifyoucantfixit:
Tartuffery \tahr-TOOF-uh-ree\, noun:
Behavior or character of a Tartuffe, especially hypocritical piety.
When Terry had finished showing his contempt and had left the office in disgust at the head's Tartuffery, Jan had calmly got up from her seat and looked hard at the shell-shocked, speechless woman before addressing her.
-- Derryl Flynn, The Albion
Not the sophistry, the malevolence, the restless apathy of the masses, the arrogance and insensitivity of the ruling class, the vulgarity, the bigotry, the intemperance, the maniacal piety and the ungodly Tartuffery.
-- W.E. Gutman, Nocturnes
Tartuffery comes from the comedy by French playwright Molière. The central character of the eponymous play Tartuffe was a hypocritical pretender.
ifyoucantfixit:
bollix \BOL-iks\, verb:
1. To do (something) badly; bungle (often followed by up): His interference bollixed up the whole deal.
noun:
1. A confused bungle.
People always bollix up the things that are most important to them.
-- Eric Gabriel Lehman, Summer's House
It was a sort of cruel fun watching this guy bollix up his life, like watching a cat fight duct tape.
-- Sarah Smith, Chasing Shakespeares
Bollix arose in the 1930s. It's a variation on the slang word bollocks.
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