Inscrutable

 WORD OF THE DAY

inscrutable / adjective / in-SKROO-tuh-bul

Definition
1: not readily investigated, interpreted, or understood
2: mysterious

Examples
“Rosters were reconstructed by enlisting former NHLers, players from the KHL and other leagues in Europe and from the college ranks and major-junior level. There is enough of a mixture of guys who are a bit past their prime and others who are relatively unknown or waiting to be discovered to make the outcome more inscrutable than usual.”
— Marty Klinkenberg, The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada), 5 Feb. 2022

Supersymmetry is a magic mirror, and everything in what we imagine to be the real world has its ghostly, inscrutable mirror image.
— Ian Stewart, Prospect, September 2003

Did You Know?
You may have to scrutinize this word closely in order to speculate as to its origins, but there is at least one clue in this sentence.
Inscrutable derives from the Late Latin adjective inscrutabilis, which can be traced back to the verb scrutari, meaning "to search or to examine."
"Scrutari" is also the source of the English words "scrutinize" and "scrutiny."
Incidentally, the antonym "scrutable" ("capable of being deciphered or understood") is a part of our language as well, though it's less common than "inscrutable."

Yankee

 WORD OF THE DAY

Yankee / noun /  YANG-kee

What It Means

1: a native or inhabitant of New England

2: a native or inhabitant of the U.S.

EXAMPLE

We're pretty good here in Vermont about being mindful about recycling. It is in our genes. Depression-era residents used to keep everything, from small jars for nails, to the nails themselves after they were retrieved from old boards. That Yankee ingenuity absolutely comes from the resourcefulness and ability not to waste anything." 

— editorial, The Rutland (Vermont) Herald, 31 May 2022

Did You Know?

We don’t know the origin of Yankee but we do know that it began as an insult. 

British General James Wolfe used the term in a 1758 letter to express his low opinion of the New England troops assigned to him, and from around the same time period there is a report of British troops using Yankee as a term of abuse for the citizens of Boston. 

In 1775, however, after the battles of Lexington and Concord showed that colonials could stand up to British regulars, Yankee was proudly adopted by colonials as a self-descriptor in defiance of the pejorative use. Both derisive and respectable uses have existed ever since.

Debunk

WORD OF THE DAY

debunk / verb / dee-BUNK

Definition
: to expose the sham or falseness of

Examples
"The idea that dogs spend every waking moment trying to usurp their human masters and become 'the alpha' in the house ... [was] first introduced by a wolf ecologist in the mid-20th Century, [and] was later debunked after ecologists realised that the original observations of dominance behaviours were based on captive wolves (unrelated to one another) kept in a zoo enclosure."
— Jules Howard, Science Focus, 19 May 2022

The group attempts to debunk the notion that being in the office together allows for serendipitous moments of collaboration and creation.
— Samuel Axon, Ars Technica, 9 May 2022

Did You Know?
If you guessed that debunk has something to do with bunk, meaning "nonsense," you're correct. We started using bunk around the turn of the 20th century. (It derived, via bunkum, from a remark made by a congressman from Buncombe County, North Carolina.)
Within a couple of decades, debunk was first used in print for the act of taking the bunk out of something.
There are plenty of synonyms for debunk, including disprove, rebut, refute, and the somewhat rarer confute.
Even falsify can mean "to prove something false," in addition to "to make something false."
Debunk itself often suggests that something is not merely untrue but also a sham; one can simply disprove a myth, but if it is debunked, the implication is that it was a grossly exaggerated or foolish claim.