Mutt

WORD OF THE DAY

mutt / noun / MUT

Definition

1a: a stupid or insignificant person 

1b: fool

2a: a mongrel dog 

2b: cur

Examples

Our family's new dog is an affable, shaggy-haired mutt who is a delight to anyone who visits our home.

"I worried that my new acquisition was unexceptional: a mutt on the small side of medium with a shiny black coat, an extra-long nose and ears that stick out at the angle of bat wings in flight. I fell in love at obedience class, where he demonstrated what I took for a drive to excel." 

— Nora Caplan-Bricker, The New York Times Magazine, 17 Sept. 2019

Did You Know?

Mutt can now be used with either affection or disdain to refer to a dog that is not purebred, but in the word's early history, in the U.S. around the turn of the 20th century, it could also be used to describe a person—and not kindly: mutt was another word for "fool." 

The word's history lies in another insult. It comes from muttonhead, another Americanism that also means essentially "fool." 

Muttonhead had been around since the early 19th century but it was not unlike an older insult with the same meaning: people had been calling one another "sheep's heads" since the mid-16th century.

Comestible

WORD OF THE DAY

comestible / adjective /  kuh-MESS-tuh-bul

Definition

1: edible

Examples

"After all the figs have fully ripened on our farm…, we'll start collecting grapes if the birds haven't nabbed them first and then comes the olive harvest, our most precious comestible commodity." 

7

"My kids eat Spam because I ate it, and I eat it because my mother ate it: two generations and counting of comestible nostalgia, a sort of legacy." 

— Sabina Murray, The New York Times, 6 Aug. 2019

Did You Know?

Did you expect comestible to be a noun meaning "food"? You're probably not alone. 

As it happens, comestible is used both as an adjective and a noun. The adjective is by far the older of the two; it has been part of English since at least the 1400s. In fact, one of its earliest known uses was in a text printed in 1483 by William Caxton, the man who established England's first printing press. 

The noun (which is most often used in the plural form comestibles) dates to the late 1700s.

Fawn

WORD OF THE DAY

fawn / verb / FAWN

Definition

1 : to court favor by a cringing or flattering manner

2 : to show affection — used especially of a dog

Examples

"Like tech C.E.O.s today, Edison attracted an enormous following, both because his inventions fundamentally altered the texture of daily life and because he nurtured a media scrum that fawned over every inch of his laboratory and fixated on every minute of his day." 

— Casey Cep, The New Yorker, 28 Oct. 2019

"I had planned to dislike Remo, the acting professor whose Chekhov class I took last spring. I had planned to feel this way because all the theater people I knew who took his classes fawned over him in a way that drove me nuts." 

— Eliya O. Smith, The Harvard Crimson, 10 Oct. 2019

Did You Know?

Some people will be glad to learn the origins of fawn—and there's a hint about the word's etymology in that declaration. 

Middle English speakers adapted an Old English word meaning "to rejoice" to create the verb faunen, which shifted in spelling over time to become fawn. 

That Old English word, in turn, derives from fagan, meaning "glad." Fagan is also an ancestor of the English adjective fain, whose earliest (now obsolete) meaning is "happy" or "pleased." 

This fawn is not, however, related to the noun fawn, referring to a young deer. For that we can thank the Latin noun fetus, meaning "offspring."