A Trio Of Words For Thursday

I thought I would start with some words of the day~~to wake up our sleepy minds, and maybe learn something new!! Have A Great Thursday:

Ceilidh (noun)
Pronunciation: ['key-li]
Definition: (Scotland and Ireland) A social gathering, especially one at which hosts and guests participate in traditional music, dancing, or storytelling—or a professional "ceilidh" band might be hired for the event.
Usage: Today's word is clearly a Celtic one adapted for use in Ireland, Scotland, and northern England. It has no relatives in English, so all we have to worry about is the pronunciation: it sounds like 'Kay Lee' with the accent on the first syllable.
Suggested Usage: A ceilidh today is usually a party organized around folk music or folklore: "We're having a wee ceilidh at the house this weekend; would you mind telling your brother that he's invited?" However, it still may be a gathering, usually around a fire, at which the participants exchange stories: "Everyone at this quiet country ceilidh had a good story to tell about someone who wasn't there."
Etymology: Irish Gaelic céilidhe is from Old Irish célide "visit" from céile or céle "companion." The English spelling follows the Scottish. The stem here developed from Proto-Indo-European *kei- "beloved, dear" and also "bed, couch." The suffixed form *kei-wi- underlies "city," "civic," "civil" from Latin civis "citizen," probably originally referring to a member of a household. In Sanskrit, this stem became the name, "Shiva," one of the three figures in the Supreme Trinity of Hinduism, from Sanskrit s'iva- "auspicious, dear."

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Limen (noun)
Pronunciation: ['li-men]
Definition: The threshold beyond which a stimulus elicits a response.
Usage: The adjective here is "liminal." Now, most of us are familiar with the term "subliminal," as in "subliminal suggestion," generally used in the sense of "imperceptible but stimulating consciousness." That is not quite what it means. The precise meaning is "below (sub-) the threshold (of consciousness)." The difference is slight but significant, since we can speak of subliminal physical stimuli, too, as we will demonstrate in the next section. Remember the plural of today's word is "limina."
Suggested Usage: Here is how you may begin to explore the metaphorical potential of our old Freudian friend: "Hardy Flowers brought a subliminal wine that couldn't quite elicit a response from our taste buds." As for today's word itself, "I'm afraid that suggestion does not quite reach the limen of consideration." (Hopefully, it won't bring a sour response.)
Etymology: Latin limen "threshold" akin to limes, limitis "boundary," the origin of our word "limit."

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Vituperate (verb)ous (adjective)
Pronunciation: [vI-'tu-pêr-yet or -'tyu (British)]
Definition: To scold extremely harshly and with abusive language, to furiously verbally abuse.
Usage: The adjective is "vituperative" and the noun, "vituperation." One who vituperates is a vituperator. "Fulminate" originally meant "to explode," so this verb refers to an explosive verbal attack on someone. "Vituperate" also refers to an abusive verbal attack but one which is not necessarily loud.
Suggested Usage: Here is a scene I would have paid real money to witness: "The incensed priests . . . continued to raise their voices, vituperating each other in bad Latin" –Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1819). Here is the intelligent substitute for "curse" (or worse, "cuss") you have been looking for: "Vituperate as much as you please; even if you fulminate, I will not change my mind."
Etymology: Latin vituperare "to censure, find fault" from vitium "fault" + parare "to prepare, furnish." "Vitium" developed into French "vice" whence English vice "bad habit, crime." It is unrelated to the prefix "vice-" which comes from Latin vicinus "near, neighboring." It is related to Russian vina "guilt, fault."

Please feel to share any new, unique, or odd words, that you may have and enjoy using. Thank You!!

Word Of The Day 03-03-08

My Father was one of those great people who will never give you the answer, BUT will always give you the tools to figure it out. He did that with words in particular, by providing a dictionary, and a hint where to look. I grew up loving words, and spent a few years, around ages 10 & 11 looking through dictionaries, and encyclopedias kind of haphazardly. After that I got serious and over quite a bit of time read our set of Encyclopdias from A to Z, and Webster's Dictionary, from cover to cover.


I know it sounds kind of boring, but for me it was fascinating, and I search through items now, for things that I need to know, want to know, and things I never "knew" I wanted to know, until I found them in some obscure material.

Anyway I saw this word today, and thought it was so unique that I wanted to find out what it was used for, and here are the results.



Word of the Day
Floccinaucinihilipilification (noun)
Pronunciation: [flak-si-na(w)-si-ni-hi-li-pi-li-fi-'key-shên]

Definition: Holding or judging something to be worthless.

Usage: The word's main function is to be exhibited as an example of a long English word, longer by a letter than the word most people think is the longest, "antidisestablishmentarianism," but no match for "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis." There is also a widely underused verb, "floccinaucinihilipilificate." (A more useful noun with the same meaning is "floccinaucity" ['fla-si-'na(w)-si-tee].)

Suggested Usage: The word was first recorded in a letter by William Shenstone written in 1741 and published in 1777: "I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money". Don't forget that the verb is just as useless as the noun: "It is difficult for Flossie to avoid floccinaucinihilipilificating her nearly otiose husband, Otis."

Etymology: Back in the eighteenth century, the Eton Latin Grammar contained a rule that mentioned a set of words all of which meant "of little or no value": flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili. Someone, obviously, had to combine them and add the suffixes -ation to the result. Flocci is the plural of floccus "a tuft of wool" and pili, that of pilus "a hair." "Nihili" is from nihil "nothing," while "nauci" just means "worthless."

If you have any special or unique words, please share them with us!! Thank You!!


Have A Great Day!!

Clinton, Obama And The Belief In The Magic Power Of Words

The previous post was from the Hillary side of the fence, so below is one from the Obama side. It is titled:
Clinton, Obama And The Belief In The Magic Power Of Words
By Arianna Huffington, Tribune Media Services, being brought to you by Arcamax Publishing, and she writes:


Along with her "ready to lead on Day One" mantra, Hillary Clinton's favored line of attack against Barack Obama is the reincarnation of Walter Mondale's 1984 "Where's the beef?" attack on Gary Hart. In Clinton's version, Obama is little more than a shallow speechifier who believes that words are all you need to lead.

She made it explicit in a speech in Providence, R.I., on Sunday: "I could stand up here and say 'Let's just get everybody together. Let's get unified. The sky will open! The light will come down! Celestial choirs will be singing! And everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect!' Maybe I've just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear!"
Last week it was: "Speeches don't put food on the table. Speeches don't fill up your tank, or fill your prescription, or do anything about that stack of bills."

And her chief strategist, Mark Penn, summed up the "just words" meme this way: "She is in the solutions business while Obama is in the promises business."

Now, I agree with Clinton that it's important to look at how each of the Democratic candidates uses words and how rhetoric fits into how they've run their respective campaigns. And if you do, you'll see that one candidate does believe that words are like a magic wand: You utter them and reality changes. But it's not Barack Obama -- it's Hillary Clinton.
Clinton's use of words is disturbingly reminiscent of the way the Bush administration has used words: Just saying something is true is magically supposed to make it true. Call it Presto-change-o Politics.

The examples from the Bush era are so notorious they hardly bear repeating: "mission accomplished," "heckuva job," "last throes," the endless "turning the corner" in Iraq. They were all said with the arrogant belief that merely saying these words was all that was needed: Reality would literally change to fit the rhetoric.

Now let's look at Hillary Clinton's rhetoric and what is says about the campaign she's run. It started with her absurd claim that her vote for the war was really a vote to send inspectors back in. The name of the bill? "The Joint Resolution To Authorize The Use Of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq." Saying it was about sending inspectors back in doesn't mean that was about sending inspectors back in.

And then how about the endless spinning trying to diminish Obama victory after Obama victory? Here was Penn: "Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama." Mark Penn calling Virginia, Georgia, Missouri and Colorado, among others, not "significant" does not make them insignificant.

Or Clinton's "35 years of experience." She has had a distinguished record of public service, but it's not in any way 35 years of government experience, unless you want to include her time at Yale Law school, or going door to door for George McGovern in Texas, or working at the Rose law firm in Arkansas, as government experience. But her campaign seemed convinced that by repeating "35 years of experience" at every stop she would magically acquire those 35 years of experience.

But as the Bush administration has shown, believing your own words and not being able to see things as they are is not a good thing -- either for a country or a campaign. The New York Times described some Clinton aides as "baffled that a candidate who had been in the United States Senate for only three years and was a state lawmaker in Illinois before that was now outpacing a seasoned figure like Mrs. Clinton."

As Matthew Yglesias says: "Whether or not you think the more 'seasoned' candidate ought to win presidential elections, it seems to me that any campaign staffer who could be genuinely 'baffled' by experience not proving to be a winning issue is demonstrating a scary ignorance of how things work. Is her staff baffled that Joe Biden didn't win the nomination?"

Or how about the Clinton campaign's abracadabra rhetoric, designed to make the reality of what they agreed to about Florida and Michigan -- poof! -- go away. They even set up a Web site (delegatehub.com) that attempts to pull a rabbit out of the electoral hat. The site list several "facts": "FACT: Florida and Michigan should count, both in the interest of fundamental fairness and honoring the spirit of the Democrats' 50-state strategy." As Ezra Klein noted: "It's almost as if they thought putting it after . . . the word 'FACT,' would be like a Jedi mind trick."
Meanwhile, as the Clinton campaign was busy trying to use words to push the idea that losing is actually winning (you know, just like in Iraq), the Obama campaign was actually winning votes. To the extent that anything in a campaign is real, it doesn't get any more real than actual votes.

And, no, he wasn't winning them just because of his "words." He backed up his words with action: old-fashioned grassroots organizing. For instance, as was widely noted in the blogosphere, the Clinton campaign apparently found out only in February that the March 4 primary/caucus in Texas was sort of complicated: "Supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton are worried that convoluted delegate rules in Texas could water down the impact of strong support for her among Hispanic voters there, creating a new obstacle for her in the must-win presidential primary contest."

As one blogger, publius at Obsidian Wings, put it: "While they were busy 'discovering' the rules, however, the Obama campaign had people on the ground in Texas explaining the system, organizing precincts, and making PowerPoints. I know because I went to one of these meetings a week ago. I should have invited Mark Penn I suppose."

Repeat that kind of organizing throughout 23 "insignificant" states, and it turns out you get a pretty healthy delegate lead.

So let's look at how Obama uses words. Contrary to Clinton's charges, Obama never claims his words will somehow magically create change. Instead, he uses his words to ask the American people to demand change. Very little change for the better happens in Washington unless it is demanded by the people. It's instructive that, back in New Hampshire, Clinton discounted the work Martin Luther King did in creating the political atmosphere that allowed LBJ to push though the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Which is why Obama's constant invocation is "Yes we can" -- not "Yes I can." Obama uses words to persuade, to mobilize and to get people to imagine that reality can be changed. And based on how his campaign has been run, on the ground, in state after state, it's clear that he knows that changing reality is not done through magic -- it's done through hard work.

It is Clinton who uses words to deny reality, and expects them to magically change it. Haven't we had enough of that over the last seven years?

Again, May you Have A Great Weekend!! :)