What's This Word?
verb (used without object)
to continue or last permanently; endure.
The verb perdure, “to continue or last permanently; endure to the end,” comes via Middle English perduren “to continue, persist” and Old French perdurer, pardurer “to last to the end,” from Latin perdūrāre “to persist, survive, carry on, hold out, endure to the end.” Perdūrāre is a compound of the prefix per-, here used as an intensive, and the simple verb dūrāre “to make or become hard, harden, steel oneself,” a derivative of the adjective dūrus “hard, firm; harsh, (taste) strong (taste); stubborn.” Perdure entered English in the 15th century.
He hadn’t yet observed anything resembling a grove of baobabs. They seemed to thrive in isolation, although perdure would be a better term for what they did.
Yet for all that, the Gospel has always required an institutional apparatus, without which it simply won’t be able to perdure throughout history.
adjective
meanly economical; parsimonious; stingy.
The adjective cheeseparing means “parsimonious, stingy”; as a noun, cheeseparing has the related meanings “something of little or no value; stinginess, miserliness.” The term dates from the second half of the 16th century; by 1600 Shakespeare uses the term in Henry IV Part 2 where Falstaff remarks about Justice Shallow: “… like a man made after supper of a cheese paring,” i.e., thin slices of cheese cut or pared from a larger block. This original, literal meaning is obsolete today. By 1800 cheeseparing developed the sense “something scanty, inadequate, thin,” and by the 1830s, the sense “miserly economizing; stinginess; miserliness.” The adjective sense developed in the 1850s.
When it comes to public-health protections, it’s obvious which should be the guiding principle. It should not be the airlines’ cheese-paring approach to customer service: What’s the least we can get by with in normal circumstances? Instead it should be the aviation-safety question, What if?
So, when she stood at last outside the building, staring up at its facade, she felt ready to cope with anybody, including cheese-paring selfish theatre managers …
verb (used with object)
to deceive or get the better of (someone) by trickery, flattery, or the like.
The verb bamboozle, “to deceive or get the better of someone by trickery or flattery,” has no certain origin even though many explanations, more or less plausible, have been suggested. Bamboozle first appears in print in 1703; in 1710, Jonathan Swift, in his letter The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue, printed in The Tatler (No. 230), denounces bamboozle and other now unexceptionable words: “The third refinement observable in the letter I send you, consists in the choice of certain words invented by some pretty fellows; such as banter, bamboozle…. I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress…, but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me.” By 1712 bamboozle had acquired the additional meaning “to perplex, baffle, mystify.”
There are many ways for marketing professionals to bamboozle customers into believing they are getting a better deal than they actually are—notable among them “as low as” pricing come-ons and offers that promise to deliver “up to” some standard of service.
You can’t even get nicer sheets by paying more—money has no meaning there. And don’t bother typing in words like “Egyptian cotton” or “thread count”—you’re just offering them more precise ways to bamboozle you.