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WORD OF THE DAY..........courtesy of Dictionary.com
ifyoucantfixit:
pip \pip\, verb:
1. To peep or chirp.
2. (Of a young bird) to break out from the shell.
3. To crack or chip a hole through (the shell), as a young bird.
Stone's watch pipped eight o'clock. He had curly hair the color of motor oil, and pale green eyes.
-- Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City
As Fiona's horn pipped, just beyond the cab's black fender.
-- William Gibson, Zero History
Pip is a variation on the word peep which arose in the 1600s. It comes from the Lithuanian word pỹpti which was originally imitative of a baby bird
I have never really understood the meaning of the name PiP, as in Dicken's "Great Expectation." I always thought that it must
have some other meaning. But I guess, the name was meant to imply his being as vulnerable as, a newly pipped bird.. I just never really made that connection. duuh. After being raised on a farm, my grandparents also had an egg farm. I knew the word. But I had always thought that it was probably a name used in UK around the time of the books representation.
ifyoucantfixit:
phatic \FAT-ik\, adjective:
Denoting speech used to create an atmosphere of goodwill.
We conduct phatic discourse indispensable to maintaining a constant connection among speakers; but phatic speech is indispensable precisely because it keeps the possibility of communication in working order, for the purpose of other and more substantial communications.
-- Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
They're just filling the air with noise. This is what's called phatic speech. "How are you?" they might ask.
-- Adriana Lopez, Fifteen Candles
Coined by the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, phatic was first used in 1923. It probably comes from the Greek word phatos meaning "spoken."
ifyoucantfixit:
gambit \GAM-bit\, noun:
1. A remark made to open or redirect a conversation.
2. Chess. An opening in which a player seeks to obtain some advantage by sacrificing a pawn or piece.
3. Any maneuver by which one seeks to gain an advantage.
The leader was eyeing him up and down, shrewdly calculating. "Thirsty as all that, are you, my friend?" he asked. Gratefully Bomilcar seized upon the gambit. “Thirsty enough to buy everyone here a drink,” he said.
-- Colleen McCullough, The First Man in Rome
But in other cases the gambit may be a dependent clause introducing or rounding off some larger unit whose illocutionary force it helps to establish.
-- Thierry Fontenelle, Practical Lexicography: A Reader
Gambit is primarily a term used in chess. It came from the Italian idiom gambetto meaning "to trip up."
Mandy21:
Hey Janice, since you got a kick out of that article from the Clay Center Dispatch, I thought I'd share today's top story (yes, I said TOP story):
Duck Race takes thrice as long
This year's Great Republican River Duck Race took longer than usual, with the plastic ducks getting caught along the bank and in brush piles along the way.
A steady cross-wind and a lower than normal river might have been the reasons the race took nearly an hour and a half rather than around 30 minutes -- the length of last year's race.
I'm surprised they didn't have live streaming video...
Small-town life, ya gotta love it!
;D
ifyoucantfixit:
Word of the Day for Monday, May 21, 2012
belabor \bih-LEY-ber\, verb:
1. To explain, worry about, or work more than is necessary.
2. To assail persistently, as with scorn or ridicule.
3. To beat vigorously; ply with heavy blows.
4. Obsolete. To labor at.
Yours and everybody else's, thought Swiffers, but he didn't wish to belabor the obvious.
-- Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
It is distasteful to the present writer to belabor any of his fellow writers, living or dead, and, except Boccaccio, who also stood for a detestable human trait, he has here avoided doing so.
-- Ford Madox Ford, The March of Literature
Neither of them possessed energy or wit to belabor me soundly; but they insulted me as coarsely as they could in their little way.
-- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Like besot, belabor comes from the prefix be- which makes a verb out of a noun and the root labor meaning "to work."
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