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WORD OF THE DAY..........courtesy of Dictionary.com
ifyoucantfixit:
en·nui [ahn-wee, ahn-wee; Fr. ahn-nwee] Show IPA
noun
a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom: The endless lecture produced an unbearable ennui.
Origin:
1660–70; < French: boredom; Old French enui displeasure; see annoy
Synonyms
listlessness, tedium, lassitude, languor.
ifyoucantfixit:
Pyknic pik nik adjective-
Rounded or squat in body structure or figure.
She told her doctor, "she wasn't too overweight for a person with a Pyknic body.
Another short elf with the same pyknic physique wearing a scotch plaid suit and a green feather in his hat.
--R.W. Alexander, Spark of Life
He was very pyknic-looking: neckless and bull-bodied, he showed in mouth and eyes more dangerous volatility than
his mate.
-- Anthony Burgess, Honey for the Bears.
`pyknic entered the English language in the 1920s. It came from the Greek word pykn meaning "thick."
ifyoucantfixit:
Word of the Day for Tuesday,
zeitgeber \TSAHYT-gey-ber\, noun:
An environmental cue, as the length of daylight, that helps to regulate the cycles of an organism's biological clock.
The light–dark transition Zeitgeber is widely used by plants to set internal clocks not just for leaf movement but for many other activities as well.
-- John King, Reaching for the Sun
The most prominent zeitgeber in humans is the light/dark cycle.
-- Harold R. Smith, Cynthia Comella, Birgit Högl, Sleep Medicine
Zeitgeber comes directly from the German word which literally means "time-giver." It entered into English in the 1970s.
ifyoucantfixit:
ephebe \ih-FEEB\, noun:
A young man.
His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe.
-- James Joyce, Ulysses
The three Florentine Davids, those of Donatello, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo, represent the changes in the ideal of male beauty and the model of an ephebe. They are ever smaller, more strained, girlish.
-- Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary
The summer before his senior year of college, in 1997, he worked as an intern at The Paris Review. James Linville, who was then the magazine’s editor, recalled Rowan as an “ephebe type, almost Truman Capote-like.”
-- Lizzie Widdicombe, “The Plagiarist’s Tale,” The New Yorker, Feb. 13, 2012
Ephebe stems from the Greek word for a young man just entering manhood and commencing training for full Athenian citizenship. It comes from the roots ep- meaning "near" and hḗbē meaning "manhood."
ifyoucantfixit:
agley \uh-GLEE\, adjective:
Off the right line; awry; wrong.
Reasoning closely, I deduced that her interview with LP Runkle must have gone awry or, as I much prefer to put it, agley.
-- P. G. Wodehouse, Much Obliged, Jeeves
This had been one of those agley days.
-- Alisa Craig, The Grub-and-Stakers Move a Mountain
Agley comes from the Middle English word glien meaning "a squint," as in "to look at sideways."
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