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WORD OF THE DAY..........courtesy of Dictionary.com
ifyoucantfixit:
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."
ifyoucantfixit:
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."
ifyoucantfixit:
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."
ifyoucantfixit:
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.
ifyoucantfixit:
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
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