Deborah Edwards-OñoroToday's A Word A Day: cat's meow
Move and glide like a 747Linked rom today's #AWordADay email:
https://wordsmith.org/words/poetaster.html
MEANING:
noun: An inferior poet.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin poetaster, from Latin poeta (poet), from Greek poietes (poet, maker), from poiein (to make) + -aster (pejorative suffix). Earliest documented use: 1601.
Following on, can we call dwarf stars Asterasters? And former planets Planetasters?
Asking for a friend.
Wm.son#AWordADay #Religion #Faith #Science
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice. -Jerry Coyne, biology professor (b. 30 Dec 1949)
Quoted in today's #AWordADay :
'Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.' ~Susan Sontag
(Time again to reread Illness as a Metaphor)
Today's Word A Day is gallio, named after Gallio.
Not to be confused with Gallileo.
The theme for this week's words are epynyms: words named after people.
And how rare it is for that to happen.
Though it's possible U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh will have an epynym named after him, given his written October 2025 opinion.
And it won't be a positive legacy.
Made me smile to read today's A Word A Day.
"In the age of knights and quills, it was a perfectly normal word for turning your horse, or your thoughts, in another direction.
Today, it feels delightfully out of place, like a traveler who lost the GPS signal and wound up on some byway far from their destination."
Columb DuffyA THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed. -Natalie Clifford Barney, poet, playwright, and novelist (31 Oct 1876-1972)
Today's A Word A Day: nomophobia.
The second definition is one I think is interesting.
Today's Word is Podsnap:
"Podsnap is a pompous, jingoistic character, proudly immune to nuance. As Dickens describes him, “Mr Podsnap was well-to-do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap’s opinion. ... Mr Podsnap’s world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake.”
As Podsnap himself adds, “No Other Country is so Favoured as This Country. ... This Island was Blest, Sir, to the Direct Exclusion of such Other Countries as -- as there may happen to be.”
Podsnap, the walking embodiment of moral myopia in a world so tight no unpleasant facts gets through."
Indeed! This seems so familiar...
Mark