Savant

WORD OF THE DAY

savant / noun / sa-VAHNT

Definition
1a: a person of learning
1b: one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature)
2: a person affected with a developmental disorder (such as autism or intellectual disability) who exhibits exceptional skill or brilliance in some limited field (such as mathematics or music)
2b : autistic savant

Example
Ever since he was a child growing up in Melbourne, Florida, [Rivian Automotive CEO, Robert Joseph] Scaringe wanted to start his own car company. He had developed a reputation as an automotive savant and tinkered on cars in his spare time, even keeping parts in his bedroom.”
— Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN Business, 22 Nov. 2022

With roles at brands such as Sony and Facebook on her résumé, Randolph is something of an advertising and business-development savant.
—Jordan Ligons, Essence, 26 June 2022

Did You Know?
Word-loving Homo sapiens will appreciate how much there is to know about savant. For one, savant comes ultimately from the Latin word sapere (“to be wise”) by way of Middle French, where savant is the present participle of savoir, meaning “to know.”
Second, savant shares roots with the English words sapient (“possessing great wisdom”) and sage (“very wise”) (as well as Homo sapiens).
Finally, the term is sometimes used to refer to a person who demonstrates extraordinary knowledge in a particular subject or has an extraordinary ability to perform a particular task (such as complex mathematics) but has more limited capacities in other area

Adapt

WORD OF THE DAY

adapt / verb / uh-DAPT

Definition
1: to make fit (as for a new use) often by modification
2: to become adapted

Examples
"Isaac Asimov's [Foundation] novels are collections of short stories and novellas spanning thousands of years, which makes them hard to adapt as a continuous story."
— Belen Edwards, Mashable.com, 22 Dec. 2021

To adapt to natural fluctuations in temperature, light, water, and air movement without being damaged, your seedlings need to develop a tougher protective cuticle and sturdier stems; this takes a little time and some patience.
—Rita Pelczar, Better Homes & Gardens, 17 Jan. 2023

Did You Know?
Rooted in the origins of adapt is the idea of becoming specifically fit for something.
English speakers adapted adapt in the 15th century from the Middle French adapter, which was borrowed, in turn, from the Latin adaptāre,a combination of the Latin prefix ad- ("to, toward") and the verb aptāre, meaning "to put into position, bring to bear, make ready."
Aptāre is a verbal derivative of aptus, meaning "fit" or "apt."
Other descendants of aptus in English include aptitude, inept, and of course apt itself, as well as unapt and inapt.

Wangle

WORD OF THE DAY

wangle / verb / WANG-gul

Definition
1: to resort to trickery or devious methods
2: to adjust or manipulate for personal or fraudulent ends
3a: to make or get by devious means
3b: finagle

Examples
“Discussions of how to wangle free shipping or discounts dovetailed with a proposition that the group start a fund-raiser for a family in need—a worthy use for money saved.”
— Hannah Goldfield, The New Yorker, 27 Mar. 2021

The court ruled that Mr Atambayev had helped wangle the early release from prison of a mafia don, Aziz Batukayev, supposedly on compassionate grounds, using a fake diagnosis of leukemia.
—The Economist, 27 June 2020

Did You Know?
You may have noticed a striking resemblance between wangle and wrangle, both of which have a sense meaning “to obtain or finagle.”
But the two do not share a common history: wrangle is centuries older than wangle, and despite their overlap in both meaning and appearance, wangle is believed to have evolved separately by way of waggle, meaning “to move from side to side.”
Wrangle, by contrast, comes from the Old High German word ringan, meaning “to struggle.”
It’s possible, though, that wangle saved the “obtain” sense of wrangle from the brink of obsolescence—until recent decades, this usage had all but disappeared, and its revival may very well have been influenced by wangle.
We wish we could wangle conclusive evidence to support this theory, but alas!

Knackered

 WORD OF THE DAY

knackered / adjective / NAK-erd

Definition
:tired, exhausted

Examples
“[Jonathan] Smith played world-class tennis in the Grand Slams of the 1970s. ... He calls croquet ‘a great game for anyone who’s a bit knackered’ after the strains on the joints and whatnot from a pursuit such as tennis or rugby.”
 — Chuck Culpepper, The Washington Post, 9 July 2022

Mounting a knackered horse and dragging a fat old farmer, Sancho, in his wake, the don declares undying love for an ordinary girl out of her depth.
—Jeanette Winterson, New York Times, 3 Sep. 2019

Did You Know?
An apt synonym for knackered might be the phrase “dead tired” for more than one reason.
Knackered comes from the past participle of knacker, a slang term meaning “to kill,” as well as “to tire, exhaust, or wear out.”
The origins of the verb knacker are uncertain, but the word is perhaps related to an older noun knacker.
That word originally referred to a harness-maker or saddlemaker, and later to a buyer of animals no longer able to do farmwork (or their carcasses), as well as to a buyer of old structures.
Knackered is used on both sides of the Atlantic but is more common among British speakers.

Exacerbate

WORD OF THE DAY

exacerbate / verb / ig-ZASS-er-bayt

Definition
: to make more violent, bitter, or severe

Examples
"If you tend to use the elliptical when you’re recovering from a running or other sports-related injury, this could be the machine for you. Even though ellipticals are known to be one of the best options for low-impact exercise, they can sometimes still exacerbate joint pain or healing injuries. This machine, however, is similar to a recumbent bike in that you use it while seated, which takes stress off your back and
eliminates potential additional body fatigue."
 — Emilia Benton, SFGate.com (San Francisco), 15 Dec. 2022

The declining retirement security faced by growing numbers of Americans is being exacerbated by increasing longevity and quickly rising health care costs.
—Jeff Madrick, New York Review of Books, 20 Mar. 2008

Did You Know?
The Latin adjective acer, meaning "sharp," forms the basis of a number of English words.
Acerbic ("having a bitter temper or sour mood"), acrid ("having a sharp taste or odor"), and acrimony ("a harsh manner or disposition") are just the tip of the jagged iceberg.
First appearing in English in the 17th century, exacerbate combines the Latin prefix ex- ("out of" or "outside") with acer offspring acerbus, meaning "harsh" or "bitter."
Just as pouring salt in a wound worsens pain, things that exacerbate cause a situation to go from bad to worse.
A pointed insult or cutting remark, for example, might exacerbate tensions between two bitter rivals. The legacy of acer isn't all negative, however. The Latin name for the genus of maple trees and shrubs is Acer, owing to maples’ characteristically pointy leaves.

Exacerbate is frequently confused with exasperate, and with good reason.
Not only do these words resemble one another in spelling and pronunciation, they also at one time held exceedingly similar meanings.
Exasperate is today most commonly used as a synonym of annoy, but for several hundred years it also had the meanings “to make more grievous” and “to make harsh or harsher.”
Exacerbate is now the more common choice of these two words when one seeks to indicate that something is becoming increasingly bitter, violent, or unpleasant.
It comes in part from the Latin word acer, meaning “sharp,” whereas exasperate is from asper, the Latin word for “rough.”

Endemic

WORD OF THE DAY

endemic / adjective / en-DEM-ik

Definition
1a: belonging or native to a particular people or country
1b: characteristic of or prevalent in a particular field, area, or environment
2: restricted or peculiar to a locality or region
3a: an organism that is restricted or peculiar to a locality or region
3b: an endemic organism

Examples
“Scientists have also documented the presence of Galapagos rails, known locally as pachays, an endemic bird never before reported on this island, on the upper part of Pinzon Island.”
— Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 15 Dec. 2022

Divorce has become so endemic in our society that a whole lore has risen up around it: that divorce is a temporary crisis; that so many children have experienced their parents' divorce that children nowadays do not worry much about it; that in fact it makes things easier, and it is itself a mere rite of passage; that if the parents feel better, so will the children.
—Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, New Republic, 6 May 2002

Did You Know?
Ever wonder how endemic ended up in the English language?
Endemic made its way into English via French and New Latin and likely has its ultimate origin in the Greek adjective éndēmos, a word with multiple uses, among which is one describing a disease confined to one area.
Éndēmos was formed from en- ( “in”) and a form of the noun dêmos, meaning “district, country, people.”
That word was also key to the formation of the earlier word on which éndēmos was modeled: epidēmia, meaning “disease affecting a large number of individuals.”
English adopted epidemic (also via French) in the early 17th century, but endemic didn’t become...endemic until a century and a half later. The now too-familiar relation pandemic slipped into the language in the mid 17th.
In current use, endemic characterizes diseases that are generally found in a particular area—malaria, for example, is said to be endemic to tropical and subtropical regions—while epidemic indicates a sudden, severe outbreak within that region or group.
Endemic is also used by biologists to characterize plant and animal species that are found only in a given area.

Vulpine

 WORD OF THE DAY

vulpine / adjective / VUL-pine

Definition
1: of, relating to, or resembling a fox
2: foxy, crafty

Example
“I was reading in peace when a shocking noise came through the window: the sound of a person shrieking in distress. ... A spurt of hasty Googling revealed that I was hearing ‘vixen screeches’—the mating calls of local red foxes. ... Breeding season in Massachusetts, where I’m currently located, is approaching its conclusion. Silence will soon return. But a part of me will miss the adrenaline spikes caused by these haunting vulpine screams.”
— Molly Young, The New York Times, 26 Feb. 2022

Did You Know?
In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau described foxes crying out as they hunted through the winter forest, and he wrote, “Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated.”
Thoreau’s was far from the first use of vulpine to describe our sly friends; English writers have been applying that adjective to the foxlike as well as the shrewd and crafty since at least the 15th century, and the Latin parent of our term, vulpinus (from the Latin word vulpes, meaning “fox”), was around long before that.
Incidentally, the scientific name of the red fox, one of two possible North American fox species to have cussed out Thoreau, is Vulpes vulpes.

Misanthrope

WORD OF THE DAY

misanthrope / noun / MISS-un-throhp

Definition
: a person who hates or distrusts humankind

Examples
“Scholars writing in 2015 found that, even after correcting for gender, education, and age, the least cynical people saw an average monthly increase in income of about $300 over nine years. The most cynical saw no significant income increase at all. The authors explain this pattern by noting that cynics ‘are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help.’ In other words, being a misanthrope is costly.”
— Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic, 20 Jan. 2022

Rather she is the genuine article, a misanthrope so pure she can't understand "why solitary confinement is considered punishment."
—Lewis Burke Frumkes, New York Times Book Review, 10 May 1992

Did You Know?
The essence of misanthrope might be understood in modern parlance as “haters gonna hate.”
Adopted in the early 17th century from Greek misanthrōpos, “hating humankind,” (from misein, “to hate,” and anthrōpos, “human being”) its use was encouraged by French playwright Molière’s 1666 satiric comedy Le Misanthrope, which depicts a bitter critic of society who chooses exile over contact with other people.
Misanthrope has a close relation in misanthropy, “a hatred or distrust of humankind,” which in turn has an opposite that, happily, is more common than either: philanthropy most often refers to the practice of giving time and money to help others; its Greek root means “loving humankind.”
Philanthropes also exist, though they’re usually referred to as philanthropists.

Implacable

WORD OF THE DAY

implacable / adjective / im-PLAK-uh-bul

Definition
: not placable
: not capable of being appeased, significantly changed, or mitigated

Examples
"His fellow cavers called Mr. [Marion] Smith 'the Goat,' and he certainly looked the part, with a compact, wiry body and a wispy caprine beard dangling below a well-cragged face. He was likewise goatish in his implacable determination to keep going through mud and cold and scraped shins, with little patience for those who couldn't keep up."
— Clay Risen, The New York Times, 18 Dec. 2022

The public will often reach the same calculus, coming to see their attacker as an implacable threat that can only be neutralized through defeat.
—Max Fisher, New York Times, 11 Oct. 2022

Did You Know?
Implacable is rooted in Latin placare, meaning "to soothe," but its im- prefix is a variant of the negating prefix in- (as in inactive) and it signals that there’s nothing warm and fuzzy here.
Someone or something described as implacable cannot be soothed, which usually means trouble: implacable is most often attached to words like foe, enemy, hatred and hostility.
The opposite of implacable is, of course, placable; it means "easily soothed," but sadly isn’t called upon very often.
Another placare word is likely more familiar.
Placate means "to soothe or appease"; it’s frequently applied when an angry person is made to feel less so.

Hoodwink

 WORD OF THE DAY

hoodwink / verb / HOOD-wink

Definition
1a: to deceive by false appearance
1b: dupe
2 (archaic): blindfold
3 (obsolete): hide

Examples

“A financial advisor’s credentials can be helpful, but beware—sometimes, less scrupulous financial advisors will use irrelevant or fraudulent qualifications to hoodwink clients.”
— Ashley Kilroy, Yahoo Finance, 14 Aug. 2022

Paired with knowledge gleaned over decades from scientists studying the mechanisms the immune system uses to detect foreign invaders, these tools could be used to hoodwink it into regarding the pig as something more akin to a friendly tourist.
—Megan Molteni, STAT, 24 Jan. 2022

Did You Know?
We usually use the word wink to refer to a brief shutting of one eye, but hoodwink draws on an older and more obscure meaning of wink covered in our Unabridged Dictionary: “to close one’s eyes.”
To hoodwink someone originally was to effectively do that kind of winking for the person; it meant to “cover someone’s eyes,” as with a hood or a blindfold.
This 16th-century term soon came to be used figuratively for veiling the truth. “The public ... is as easily hood-winked,” wrote the Irish physician Charles Lucas in 1756, by which time the figurative use had been around for decades—and today, that meaning of the word is far from winking out.

Paladin

WORD OF THE DAY

paladin / noun / PAL-uh-din

Definition
1: a trusted military leader (as for a medieval prince)
2: a leading champion of a cause

Examples
“This collection of stories by one of England's best novelists is both playful and serious in the manner of Laurence Sterne, the 18th-century author of ‘Tristram Shandy.’ ... Sterne was the master of the marginal, the random, the inconsequential. In our own day, David Foster Wallace, Geoff Dyer and Ali Smith have become the paladins of this goofy manner.”
— Edmund White, The New York Times, 2 Dec. 2016

But who was this paladin of the West going to protect civilization from?
—Kanishk Tharoor, The New Republic, 22 Feb. 2021

Did You Know?
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we know the site where it was founded: Palatine Hill (known as Palatium in Latin), site of the cave where Roman legend tells us Romulus and Remus were abandoned as infants, nursed by a she-wolf, and fed by a woodpecker before being found by a herdsman.
In ancient Rome, the emperor’s palace was located on the Palatine Hill; since the site was the seat of imperial power, Latin palatium came to mean “imperial” as well as “palace."
From palatium came Latin palatinus, also meaning “imperial” and later “imperial official.”
Different forms of these words passed through Latin, Italian, and French, picking up various meanings along the way, and eventually some of those forms made their way into English, including paladin and palace.

Countenance

WORD OF THE DAY

countenance / noun / KOWN-tun-unss

Definition
1a: look, expression
1b: mental composure
1c: calm expression
2: face, visage
2b: the face as an indication of mood, emotion, or character
3a: bearing or expression that offers approval or sanction
3b: moral support
4a (archaic): aspect, semblance
4b: pretense
5 (obsolete): bearing, demeanor

Examples
“The film stars Emily Watson and Paul Mescal as mother Aileen and son Brian, whose isolated, tight-knit fishing village on the Irish coast is lovely and decrepit. ... Mescal's charming but cagey performance is as much a lure for the audience as for Aileen herself, and Watson is breathtaking to watch as the cycle of furies and fears and doubts warp her countenance.”
— Lauren Puckett-Pope, ELLE, 30 Sept. 2022

All, all are kind to me but their tones fall strangely on my ear & their countenances meet mine not like home faces …
—Emily Dickinson 17 Feb. 1848, in Selected Letters,  (1914) 1986

Did You Know?
Let’s face it: the countenance familiar to modern speakers does not bear an obvious resemblance to its Latin root continēre, meaning “to hold together” (a root it shares with contain).
But the path between continēre and countenance becomes clearer when we think of the figurative “holding together” present in the idea of restraint.
When countenance was first used in English (having traveled from Latin through Anglo-French) it referred to a person’s appearance or behavior—their demeanor—which is a product of restraint, or the lack thereof.
From “demeanor” it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to “facial expression.” A few centuries after that development, in the late 16th century, countenance faced a new task head-on—use as a verb meaning “to extend approval or toleration to.

Luscious

WORD OF THE DAY

luscious / adjective / LUSH-us

Definition
1a: having a delicious taste or smell
1b: sweet
1c (archaic): excessively sweet
1d: cloying
2a: sexually attractive
2b: seductive, sexy
3a: richly luxurious or appealing to the senses
3b: excessively ornate

Example
“There are countless avenues to flavoring a pot of beans; this one, with the addition of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce and a bit of tomato paste, will lead the beans to a slightly spicy, slightly smoky place rendering them hearty and flavorful enough to be the star of the plate. ... Drizzling in a little additional olive oil to the vegetable stock will give you a very luscious, delicious pot liquor, or broth.”
— Andrea Aliseda, Whetstone Magazine, 16 May 2022

The property, which the actress purchased for $2.75 million in 2009, includes hundreds of olive, avocado, and citrus trees, a gorgeous adobe hacienda, detached guesthouse, luscious floral gardens and a walk-in chicken coop.
—Brenda Richardson, Forbes, 11 Oct. 2022

Did You Know?
Have you ever heard a young child describe a favorite food as “licius” instead of “delicious”?
Back in the Middle Ages, the word licius was sometimes used as a shortened form of delicious by adults and kids alike.
Linguists believe that luscious may have developed when licius (which comes from the Latin verb delicere, meaning “to entice by charm or attraction”) was further altered to lucius by 15th-century speakers.
The adjective lush can sometimes mean “delicious” as well but is not a shortened form of luscious, having developed on its own from the Middle English lusch, meaning “soft or tender.”

Bombast

 WORD OF THE DA Y

bombast / noun / BAHM-bast

Definition
: pretentious inflated speech or writing

Examples
“... this sprawling German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic WWI novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a film that feels both aesthetically dazzling and full of necessary truths: an antiwar drama that transcends the bombast of propaganda mostly just because it's so artfully and indelibly made.”
— Leah Greenblatt Entertainment Weekly, 28 Oct. 2022

Since the start of this year’s invasion, when Mr. Putin cast aside the pretense that Russia wasn’t active in Ukraine, Mr. Prigozhin has embraced a more public role with statements laced with bombast and sarcasm.
—Thomas Grove, WSJ, 12 Nov. 2022

Did You Know?
Bombast settled softly into English in the mid-late 16th century as a textile term used to refer to cotton or other soft fibrous material used as padding or stuffing (its ultimate source is likely Middle Persian pambak, meaning “cotton”).
Within a decade it had extended from literal stuffing to figurative stuffing, referring to speech or writing that is padded with pretentious verbiage.
The adjective bombastic, which followed bombast a century later, has been a favorite choice to describe blowhards, boasters, and cockalorums ever since

Teleological

WORD OF THE DAY

teleological / adjective / tel-ee-uh-LAH-jih-kul

Definition
: exhibiting or relating to design or purpose especially in nature

Examples
"Hegelianism—at least as [Søren] Kierkegaard understood it ... —treated history as an intelligible process by which humanity progressed toward a state of spiritual freedom. ... To Kierkegaard, this sweeping teleological view left no room for human agency."
— Christopher Beha, Harper's, 27 Apr. 2020

From the rally scene on, Ahmed takes it more or less as a given that progress is cyclical, not teleological.
—Lily Meyer, The Atlantic, 12 Aug. 2021

Did You Know?
Perhaps teleological was destined to serve a role in English.
The word, along with its close relative teleology, comes to us by way of New Latin, from the Greek root telos, meaning "end or purpose."
Both entered English in the 18th century, followed by teleologist in the 19th century.
Teleology has the basic meaning of "the study of ends or purposes."
A teleologist attempts to understand the purpose of something by looking at its results.
A teleological philosopher might argue that we should judge whether an act is good or bad by seeing if it produces a good or bad result, and a teleological explanation of evolutionary changes claims that all such changes occur for a definite purpose.

Charlatan

 WORD OF THE DAY

charlatan / noun / SHAHR-luh-tun

Definition
1: quack
2a: one making usually showy pretenses to knowledge or ability
2b: fraud, faker

Examples
“A particular gripe of mine is when bogus scientific results, sometimes fraudulent, sometimes just sloppy, manage to sneak into the peer-reviewed scientific literature. This happens all too often, especially as the number of papers published each year has grown. These bad papers are then used by fraudsters and charlatans (and sometimes by innocent people who just don’t have the expertise to understand) to ‘prove’ an unscientific claim.”
— Steven Salzberg, Forbes, 25 July 2022

Meanwhile, her family contends with their charlatan of a relative, the new Lord Featherington (Rupert Young), who seeks to con the ton out of their wealth.
—Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 25 Mar. 2022

Did You Know?
In medieval Italy, people roamed throughout the land selling fake remedies and making false claims about their healing abilities.
Many of these pretenders reputedly came from a village called Cerreto, and as a result, cerretano (meaning “inhabitant of Cerreto”) became an epithet for a quack physician.
In addition, these frauds used a practiced patter to attract customers, like the chatter of a circus barker.
The Italian word for “to chatter” is ciarlare, and chattering was so associated with the cerretano that the spelling of the word shifted to ciarlatano.
By the early 17th century, English speakers had anglicized the Italian word to charlatan and adopted it as their own.