The opulence, the music, the gouty food -- all start to cloyThe season of debates, primaries and candidacy was exhillerating in January and February; yet has become cloy today in May.
my senses.--
Jeffrey Tayler, "The Moscow Rave part two: I Have Payments to
Make on My Mink", Atlantic, December 31, 1997
I
use orange and lemon zest in the recipe and a drizzle of soured cream at the
table
to take away its tendency to cloy.-- Nigel Slater, "Cream tease", The
Observer, December 14, 2003
The soft Orvieto Abboccato has just enough
sweetness to please but not to cloy, a friendly character that tempts one to
linger over a second glass.-- George Pandi, "Orvieto's pleasures deserve to be
savored like its wine", Boston Herald, July 18, 2004
I love this word.
To learn more about global warming and the film, go to the following website:
http://www.climatecrisis.net/
See a trailer: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2078944470709189270
Women's groups have contended that jobs that usually go to men pay more because of the old-fashioned idea that a man is supporting a family while a woman is merely working for pin money.-- Juan Williams, "A Question of Fairness", The Atlantic, February-1987
Meaning of: Pin Money
Pin Money: Catharine Howard, wife of Henry VIII., introduced pins into England from France. As they were expensive at first, a separate sum for this luxury was granted to the ladies by their husbands. Hence the expression "pin-money."
“And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today”.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. April 3, 1968 Memphis, TN
"There is nothing new about poverty," he said. "What is new is that we now have
the means and the know-how to lift every child out of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will!"
Whenever I hear the words, deus ex machina, I think back to college to my Intro to Theatre Class. We gathered on the commons outside the Jones Theatre building with commissary tomato cans tied to our feet and a very poorly constructed mask impairing our vision. It's the only memory of Greek theatre left in my brain and any form of a deity saving plot immediately conjurs this image to my brain.
The images dotting the page are varyJPG files I picked from googling deus ex machina... I definitely think the Stressed Out Cat is my favorite.
Word History:
"She's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile" and "He is the very pineapple of politeness" are two of the absurd pronouncements from Mrs. Malaprop that explain why her name became synonymous with ludicrous misuse of language. A character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals (1775), Mrs. Malaprop consistently uses language malapropos, that is, inappropriately. The word malapropos comes from the French phrase mal à propos, made up of mal, "badly," à, "to," and propos, "purpose, subject," and means "inappropriate."
The Rivals was a popular play, and Mrs. Malaprop became enshrined in a common noun, first in the form malaprop and later in malapropism, which is first recorded in 1849. Perhaps that is what Mrs. Malaprop feared when she said, "If I reprehend any thing in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!"[Mrs. Malaprop examples]
- "O, he will dissolve my mystery!" [resolve]
- "He is the very pine-apple of politeness!" [pinnacle]
- "I have since laid Sir Anthony's preposition before her;" [proposition]
There will be varying levels of jollification today
due to today's date, April 1st.
Don't be fooled.
in case you were wondering.....Weekend Word Wrap by David - August 11, 2006 - 9:16 AM
As promised, today’s edition of the Weekend Word Wrap is on “malapropisms”—a word not to be confused with Bushisms. While George W. certainly has rattled off his fair share of them over the years (“We must always remember that all human beings begin life as a feces”), a Bushism shouldn’t be mistaken for a malapropism, nor vice-versa. Very often you’ll hear or read people using the the two interchangeably. The truth is, our president doesn’t usually speak in malapropisms. His “manglement” of the language is so unique, it needs its own term.
Definition: intolerance
Synonyms: ageism, animosity, antipathy,
apartheid, aversion, bad opinion, belief, bias, bigotry, chauvinism,
contemptuousness, detriment, discrimination, disgust, dislike, displeasure,
disrelish, enmity, injustice, jaundiced eye, mind-set, misjudgment,
narrow-mindedness, one-sidedness, partiality, pique, preconceived notion,
preconception, prejudgment, prepossession, racism, repugnance, revulsion,
sexism, slant, umbrage, unfairness, warp, zenophobia.
Notes: a person’s bias is based on facts, but prejudice occurs without a person knowing or examining
the facts.
Today’s word is:
excrescence \ik-SKRESS-uhn(t)s\, noun:1. Something (especially something abnormal) growing out from something else.2. A disfiguring or unwanted mark, part, or addition.
Example:
Even Henry Mee's well-known portrait of Anthony Powell makes the novelist look as if he had some odd excrescence growing out of his head.-- DJ Taylor, "Picture this dead chicken, then ponder a fine artistic tradition", Independent, June 22, 2001
Excrescence is one of those five-dollar words. If I were referring to the sentence above, I’d probably say, "Henry Mee had some weird abnormal protrusion growing out of his head. It was really disgusting". Using "excresence" is far more gentile and dignified.
This brings me to the core of why there are all of these “today’s word” postings. I have a couple of simple reasons:
1) to expand my vocabulary and ...
2) the fear of Alzheimer’s.
I believe if I practice writing about the Word for Today from dictionary.com's selection, I might actually retain something.
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