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WORD OF THE DAY..........courtesy of Dictionary.com
ifyoucantfixit:
cumulus \KYOO-myuh-luhs\, noun:
1. A heap; pile.
2. A cloud of a class characterized by dense individual elements in the form of puffs, mounds, or towers, with flat bases and tops that often resemble cauliflower.
He was organizing the year's remnants. He was logging and archiving and filing it all. The whole swollen yearlong cumulus.
-- Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia
"So where is it at, Minogue," asks the palatal man, aloft in a cumulus of webs and dust and creak.
-- David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair
umulus stems from the Neo-Latin word meaning "heap, pile." It was first used to describe clouds in the early 1800s.
ifyoucantfixit:
chrestomathy \kres-TOM-uh-thee\, noun:
A collection of selected literary passages.
I had learned to read Sanscrit and to translate easy passages in the chrestomathy, and devoted myself with special zeal to the study of the Latin grammar and prosody.
-- Georg Ebers, The Story of My Life from Childhood to Manhood
This little chrestomathy preserves almost the only words of Atticus to have survived from antiquity.
-- Peter White, Cicero in Letters
Chrestomathy literally means "useful to learn" in Greek, from the roots chres- meaning "to use" and math- meaning "to learn."
ifyoucantfixit:
demiurge \DEM-ee-urj\, noun:
1. Philosophy. A. Platonism. The artificer of the world. B. (In the Gnostic and certain other systems) a supernatural being imagined as creating or fashioning the world in subordination to the Supreme Being, and sometimes regarded as the originator of evil.
2. (In many states of ancient Greece) a public official or magistrate.
Larger than a character, the river is a manifest presence, a demiurge to support the man and the boy, a deity to betray them, feed them, all but drown them, fling them apart, float them back together.
-- Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art
The gnostics think this world was created by a bad god—a demiurge—who wandered too far from the True God and somehow got perverted.
-- Derek Swannson, Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg
Demiurge meant "a worker for the people" in Ancient Greek, from the roots dḗmio- meaning "of the people" and -ergos, "a worker."
ifyoucantfixit:
ingeminate \in-JEM-uh-neyt\, verb:
To repeat; reiterate.
Sitting among his friends, often, after a deep silence and frequent sighs, he would with a shrill and sad accent ingeminate the word Peace, Peace...
-- Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation
Mr. Dott's spirits were a little dashed, especially as Niven with a fateful countenance continued to ingeminate the word “Hungrygrain.”
-- Arthur Train, Tutt and Mr. Tutt
Ingeminate comes from the Latin word ingemināre which meant "to repeat or redouble."
ifyoucantfixit:
betide \bih-TAHYD\, verb:
1. To happen to; come to; befall.
2. To happen; come to pass.
"Ill luck betide thee, poor damsel," said Sancho, "ill luck betide thee!"
-- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
"The girls' skirts are measured each week with a dressmaker's rule," she would say, "to see that they conform to the length prescribed. Woe betide any girl whose skirt does not."
-- Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love
Betide stems from the Old English word tide meaning "something that happened." As in besot and belabor, the prefix be- turns the noun into a verb.
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