Monthly Readings for August 2006

August 10, 2006: NPR. You Must Read This: Hooked on the Most Importatnt Food Writer Alife - Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Buford, Bill
August 15, 2006: PC Mag. The Top 101 Classic Web Sites of 2006
August 21, 2006: PCMag. Ten Future Classic Web Sites.

Word of the Day ArchiveMonday August 28, 2006 aegis

aegis \EE-jis\,
noun:1. Protection; support.2. Sponsorship; patronage.3. Guidance, direction, or control.4. A shield or protective armor; -- applied in mythology to the shield of Zeus.

• It is this ideal of the human under the aegis of something higher which seems to me to provide the strongest counterpressure against the fragmentation and barbarization of our world.-- Ted J. Smith III (Editor), In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963
• A third round of talks is scheduled to begin on May 23rd in New York under the aegis of the United Nations.-- "Denktash declared head after rival withdraws", Irish Times, April 21, 2000
• In real life, Lang's father was commercially astute and fantastically hardworking, and under his aegis the construction business flourished.-- Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast

Aegis derives from the Greek aigis, the shield of Zeus, from aix, aig-, "a goat," many primitive shields being goatskin-covered.

Word of the Day ArchiveTuesday August 29, 2006 sui generis

sui generis \soo-eye-JEN-ur-us; soo-ee-\,

adjective:Being the only example of its kind; constituting a class of its own; unique.

This man, in fact, was sui generis, a true original.-- Ruth Lord, Henry F. du Pont and Winterthur

They're a special case, a category of their own, sui generis.-- Eric Kraft, Leaving Small's Hotel

In the degree of their alienation from their society and of their impact on it, the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century were a phenomenon almost sui generis.-- Aileen M. Kelly, Toward Another Shore

William Randolph Hearst did not speak often of his father. He preferred to think of himself as sui generis and self-created, which in many ways he was.-- David Nasaw, The Chief

Sui generis is from Latin, literally meaning "of its own kind": sui, "of its own" + generis, genitive form of genus, "kind."

Monthly Readings for July 2006

July 1, 2006: Slate. Swing for the Bleachers: The Tug of War for the Mind of Anthony Kennedy. Lithwick, Dahlia.
July 5, 2006: Slate. How Scalia Lost His Mojo
July 7, 2006: WikiHow. How To Solve a Sudoku
July 12, 2006: PC Mag. The Science Fiction Files
July 18, 2006: PC Mag. Midyear Predictions
July 19, 2006: ExtremeTech. Which New Browser is Best: Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, or Opera 9
July 26, 2006: PC Mag. LCDs for Everyone

Word of the Day for Thursday July 20, 2006 nescience

nescience \NESH-uhn(t)s; NESH-ee-uhn(t)s\, noun:Lack of knowledge or awareness; ignorance.

• The ancients understood that too much knowledge could actually impede human functioning -- this at a time when the encroachments on global nescience were comparatively few.-- Cullen Murphy, "DNA Fatigue", The Atlantic, November 1997
• He fought on our behalf in the war that finally matters: against nescience, against inadvertence, against the supposition that anything is anything else.-- Hugh Kenner, "On the Centenary of James Joyce", New York Times, January 31, 1982
• The notion has taken hold that every barometric fluctuation must demonstrate climate change. This anecdotal case for global warming is mostly nonsense, driven by nescience of a basic point, from statistics and probability, that the weather is always weird somewhere.-- Gregg Easterbrook, "Warming Up", The New Republic, November 8, 1999

Nescience is from Latin nescire, "not to know," from ne-, "not" + scire, "to know." It is related to science. Nescient is the adjective form.

Monthly Readings for June 2006

June 21, 2006: PC Mag. Expert View: A Media Center for Any Room
June 21, 2006: PC Mag. Dallas. WiFi hot spots, hi-tech attractions, best wired hotels

Monthly Readings for May 2006

May 1, 2006: New York Times. Audra McDonald's Degree of Difficulty: Challenging to Scary. Concert review. With Fred Hersch. Holden, Stephen.
May 2, 2006: Extreme VOIP. Senate Bill Attacks Content, VOIP, Analog TVs
May 5, 2006: PC Mag. The Best Products of Q1 2006

Word of the Day for Sunday May 21, 2006

bombinate \BOM-buh-nayt\, intransitive verb:To buzz; to hum; to drone.

• He is often drunk. His head hurts. Snatches of conversation, remembered precepts, prefigured cries of terror bombinate about his skull.-- Elspeth Barker, "Nobs and the rabble, all in the same boat", Independent, September 22, 1996
• Sometimes the computer bombinates way into the night, stops for a bit of rest, then resumes its hum at the early hours of the morning.-- Cheryl Glenn and Robert J. Connors, New St. Martins Guide to Teaching Writing

Bombinate is from Late Latin bombinatus, past participle of bombinare, alteration of Latin bombilare, from bombus, "a boom."

Word of the Day for Wednesday May 17, 2006 arrant

arrant \AR-unt\, adjective:Thoroughgoing; downright; out-and-out; confirmed; extreme; notorious.

• More deplorable is his arrant and compulsive hypocrisy . . . Under all the chest hair, he was a hollow man.-- J. D. McClatchy, review of Crux: The Letters of James Dickey, New York Times, December 19, 1999
• I think a pilot would be a most arrant coward, if through fear of bad weather he did not wait for the storm to break but sank his ship on purpose.-- Georges Minois, History Of Suicide translated by Lydia Cochrane
• The moon's an arrant thief,And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.-- Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
• The entire story is a load of arrant nonsense.-- Victor Pelevin, Buddha's Little Finger translated by Andrew Bromfield

Arrant was originally a variant spelling of errant, meaning "wandering." It was first applied to vagabonds, as an arrant (or errant) rogue or thief, and hence passed gradually into its present sense. It ultimately derives from Latin iter, "a journey."

Word of the Day for Thursday May 18, 2006 palimpsest

palimpsest \PAL-imp-sest\, noun:1. A manuscript, usually of papyrus or parchment, on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible.2. An object or place whose older layers or aspects are apparent beneath its surface.

• The manuscript is a palimpsest consisting of vellum leaves from which the "fluent and assured script" of the original Archimedes text and 55 diagrams had been washed or scraped off so that the surface could be used for new writings.-- Roger Highfield, "Eureka! Archimedes text is to be sold at auction", Daily Telegraph, October 3, 1998
• Each is a palimpsest, one improvisation partly burying another but leaving hints of it behind.-- Robert Hughes, "Delight for Its Own Sake", Time, January 22, 1996
• It's a mysterious many-layered palimpsest of a metropolis where generations of natives and visitors have left their mark, from Boadicea and the Romans, through the Middle Ages and the Elizabethan era to the present.-- Philip French, "Jack the knife", The Observer, February 10, 2002

Palimpsest is from Latin palimpsestus, from Greek palimpsestos, "scraped or rubbed again," from palin, "again" + psen, "to rub (away)."

May 18, 2006: Minutes - Upcoming Engineering Institute Projects Review

Raytheon business Wilma Calderone Amby Nangeroni Learning Solutions Stephen Milam

May 17, 2006: New Leader Assimilation Notes

Raytheon business Wilma Calderone Maureen Syzmanski

May 8, 2006: Development Team Staff Meeting Notes

Raytheon business Wilma Calderone

Word of the Day for Tuesday May 9, 2006 otiose

otiose \OH-shee-ohs; OH-tee-\, adjective:

1. Ineffective; futile.

2. Being at leisure; lazy; indolent; idle.

3. Of no use.

• Mr. Federspiel's surreal flourishes and commentaries straddle the line between interesting and otiose. Most of the surrealism is pretty but pointless.-- D. F. Wallace, "The Million-Dollar Tattoo", New York Times, May 5, 1991
• Although the wild outer movements and the angular Minuet can take such clockwork precision, the Andante, with its obsessive, claustrophobic dialogues between strings and bassoons, seemed sluggish and otiose.-- Tim Ashley, "VPO/Maazel", The Guardian, April 16, 2002
• The umlaut he affected, which made no difference to the pronunciation of his name, was as otiose as a pair of strategically positioned beauty spots.-- Peter Conrad, "Hidden shallows", New Statesman, October 14, 2002
• One hazard for religions in which all professional intermediaries are dispensed with, and in which the individual is enjoined to 'work out your own salvation' and is regarded as fully capable of doing so, is that belief and practice become independent of formal organized structures which may in such a context come to be perceived as otiose.-- Lorne L. Dawson, "The Cultural Significance of New Religious Movements: The Case of Soka Gakkai", Sociology of Religion, Fall 2001

Otiose is from Latin otiosus, "idle, at leisure," from otium, "leisure."

Word of the Day for Tuesday May 2, 2006 daedal

daedal \DEE-duhl\, adjective:1. Complex or ingenious in form or function; intricate.2. Skillful; artistic; ingenious.3. Rich; adorned with many things.

• Most Web-site designers realize that large image maps and daedal layouts are to be avoided, and the leading World Wide Web designers have reacted to users' objections to highly graphical, slow sites by using uncluttered, easy-to-use layouts.-- "Fixing Web-site usability", InfoWorld, December 15, 1997
• He gathered toward the end of his life a very extensive collection of illustrated books and illuminated manuscripts, and took heightened pleasure in their daedal patterns as his own strength declined.-- Florence S. Boos, preface to The Collected Letters of William Morris
• I sang of the dancing stars,I sang of the daedal earth,And of heaven, and the giant wars,And love, and death, and birth.-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Hymn Of Pan"

Daedal comes from Latin daedalus, "cunningly wrought," from Greek daidalos, "skillful, cunningly created."

Monthly Readings April 2006

April 2, 2006: ExtremeTech. A Trio of Widescreen Monitors
April 4, 2006: eWeek. Making Your Apps Work with Internet Explorer 7
April 5, 2006: eWeek. Boot Camp: Apple's Enterprise Trojan Horse?
April 11, 2006: PC Mag. FeedDemon 2.0. Best desktop RSS aggregator
April 17, 2006: The Pulitzer Prizes: Nominees and Winners
April 18, 2006: PC Mag. Media Center Laptops
April 19, 2006: PC Mag. Bright and Clear, Ready for Business. Review LCD monitors
April 26, 2006: PCMag. Worst Products of Q1 2006
April 30, 2006: New York Times. Obituary: John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Miror to Society

Word of the Day for Monday April 24, 2006 rebarbative

rebarbative \ree-BAR-buh-tiv\, adjective:Serving or tending to irritate or repel.

• Over the past couple of hours a lot of rebarbative, ulcerated and embittered people had been working hard at bedding their resentments down in sensory-deprivation tanks full of alcohol.-- Will Self, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
• I still think this true, yet can't help regret the unretrievable hours lavished on so much rebarbative critical prose, convinced that the nearly impenetrable must be profound.-- Michael Dirda, "In which our intrepid columnist visits the Modern Language Association convention and reflects on what he found there", Washington Post, January 28, 2001

Rebarbative comes from French rébarbatif, "stern, surly, grim, forbidding," from Middle French rebarber, "to be repellent," from re- (from the Latin) + barbe, "beard" (from Latin barba).

Word of the Day for Sunday April 16, 2006 hortatory

hortatory \HOR-tuh-tor-ee\, adjective:Marked by strong urging; serving to encourage or incite; as, "a hortatory speech."

• He later gave up the ministry in the conviction that he could reach thousands with his beguiling pen and only hundreds with his hortatory voice.-- Carl Van Doren, The American Novel, 1789-1939
• Instead of "Home Run, Jack," the hortatory message that greets the batter at the plate is the subliminal one that surfaces: "Run Home, Jack."-- Marjorie Garber, Symptoms of Culture
• The former West German Chancellor's book . . . is a call to action, and, even in this good translation, the book relies heavily on the hortatory language of political appeals.-- Tamar Jacoby, "Carrots and Sticks", New York Times, August 24, 1986

Hortatory is from Latin hortatorius, from hortari, "to exhort, to incite, to encourage."

Word of the Day for Monday April 17, 2006 choler

choler \KOLL-ur; KOLE-ur\, noun:Irritation of the passions; anger; wrath.

• And at last he seems to have found his proper subject: one that genuinely engages his intellect, truly arouses his characteristic choler and fills him with zest.-- "Black Humor': Could Be Funnier", New York Times, January 12, 1998
• I found my choler rising.-- Samuel Richardson, A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments... in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison

Choler is from Latin cholera, a bilious disease, from Greek kholera, from khole, bile.

Word of the Day for Friday April 14, 2006 desuetude

desuetude \DES-wih-tood, -tyood\, noun:

The cessation of use; discontinuance of practice or custom; disuse.

Nuns and priests abandoned the identifying attire of the religious vocation and frequently also the vocation itself, experimental liturgies celebrated more the possibility of cultural advancement than that of eternal life, and popular Marian devotions fell into desuetude.
-- Michael W. Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism

Probably only one in a hundred girls who give birth clandestinely even knows that an edict of King Henry II, now fallen into desuetude, once made their action punishable by death.
-- Nina Rattner Gelbart, The King's Midwife

Where specific restrictions on personal freedom and on communal activity had not explicitly been lifted they were allowed to fall into desuetude by default.
-- David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939

The exercise of rights which had practically passed into desuetude.
-- John Richard Green, Short History of the English People

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Desuetude comes from Latin desuetudo, "disuse," from desuescere, "to become unaccustomed," from de- + suescere, "to become used or accustomed."