Word of the Day
juku
noun
a school, attended in addition to one's regular school, where students prepare for college entrance examinations.
More about juku
Juku “a school where students prepare for college entrance examinations” is a borrowing from Japanese. In its native language, juku means “private tutoring school” or “cram school” and is a term borrowed from Middle Chinese, in which it once meant “gate room.” Because juku is of Chinese origin, we can see the clear resemblance today between juku and Mandarin shú or Cantonese suk. Juku was first recorded in English in the early 1980s.
how is juku used?
The result is another kind of “exam hell” for these young children: To prepare, many attend juku, or cram schools, a process that requires a huge investment of time and often costs far more than all but the highest echelons of Japanese socioeconomic ladder can afford.
cognoscenti
plural noun
persons who have superior knowledge and understanding of a particular field, especially in the fine arts, literature, and world of fashion.
More about cognoscenti
Cognoscenti “persons who have superior knowledge of a particular field” is the plural of cognoscente, which refers to an individual person with such knowledge. Unlike English, French, and Spanish, which usually add -s or -es to indicate a plural noun, Italian typically changes the final vowel of a word; singular -a often becomes plural -e, while singular -e and -o often become plural -i. The Italian verb meaning “to know” is conoscere, with the present participle conoscente, which lacks the g of cognoscente; the reason for the g is the influence of Latin cognōscere “to know.” Cognoscenti was first recorded in English in the 1770s.
how is cognoscenti used?
In the past few decades a U.S. gastronomic explosion led in part by food TV has the culinary cognoscenti in a dither to define a national food character that includes barbeque, lobster rolls, foraged locavore salads, and molecular gastronomy.
With the U.S. and Cuba restoring diplomatic ties, some art-world cognoscenti are betting that the tiny island could become the next hot corner of the global art market.
intramundane
adjective
existing or occurring within the material world.
More about intramundane
Intramundane “existing within the material world” is based on intra- “within” and mundane “common, ordinary, of the earth.” Intra- comes from Latin intrā “within, inside” and is related to interior, internal, intestine, intimate, intrinsic, and introduce, all of which come from Latin terms involving movement toward or existence inside something. Mundane ultimately comes from Latin mundus; as we learned from the recent Word of the Day gens du monde, mundus originally meant “clean” before expanding to mean “elegant,” then “ornament,” and finally “the world.” A similar shift in meaning happened with the unrelated Ancient Greek word kósmos “order, government, universe,” as in cosmic and cosmopolitan. Intramundane was first recorded in English in the 1830s.
how is intramundane used?
In fact, correct understanding of the problem of void entails distinguishing two levels: the anthropological and the cosmological, or—to put it another way—the intramundane level and that of the totality of being …. For Sartre, this intramundane dimension is essential, and distinct from the extramundane, the void as an infinite milieu.
In Fink’s view, play, more than work, struggle, or love, provides the “operative model” most conducive to revealing the mundanity of the world; … in play, the human being deals not with another, equally real being but with the unreal, such that play is thus always more than mere intramundane behavior.