Word of the Day

Pièce de résistance, “the principal dish of a meal; the most noteworthy item of a group,” entered English from French in 1789—a fateful year. In French pièce de résistance appears at least by 1732 and refers to the main course of a meal. By 1789 the phrase was used in English to describe a person. The phrase literally means “piece of resistance,” but scholars disagree on how the phrase acquired its senses.

The verb skylark, “to frolic; sport; have boisterous fun,” dates from about 1771 in Britain. This sense is the same as the verb lark, which comes later, in 1813. How skylark acquired its “fun” sense isn’t clear: some suggest it was a term in sailors’ slang for roughhousing high up in a ship’s rigging, skylarks being known for their singing while hovering high in the air. The earliest occurrences of the verb, however, are from court and police records in London, which seem to indicate that the verb skylark is a city word, not a sailor’s one. Skylark is a favorite word of Mark Twain’s: he used the participle or gerund skylarking four times in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).

Bovarism, “an exaggerated, especially glamorized, estimation of oneself,” also spelled bovarysm and bovarysme (capitalized and uncapitalized), is a borrowing from French bovarysme, a derivative of the family name Bovary, the married surname of Emma Bovary, née Rouault, the eponymous protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1857) who was prone to escapist daydreaming. The French philosopher Jules de Gaultier is credited with coining the term in his 1902 work, La Bovarysme. Bovarism entered English in the first half of the 20th century.

As an adverb, peradventure means “maybe, possibly, perhaps”; as a noun, peradventure means “chance, doubt, or uncertainty.” Peradventure comes from Middle English paraventur(e), peradventure (and 20 other spelling variants), from Old French and Anglo-French par aventure, peradventure. Par is an 11th-century development of Latin and Old French per “through, by, by means of.” Adventure comes from Middle English aventure, avento(u)r, adventure, from Old and Middle French aventure “destiny, fate, chance; risk, peril,” from Medieval Latin (rēs) adventūra “(thing) about to come, (thing) going to happen.” Adventūra is the future participle of the Latin verb advenīre “to come to, arrive at, reach; (of conditions) to arise, develop; (of possessions) to come into the hands of.” Peradventure entered English about 1300.

Palaver, “profuse and idle talk; chatter," comes from Portuguese palavra “word, talk, speech" by way of sailors' slang. Portuguese was commonly used as a trading language on the West African coast, and palaver came into English first in the sense "a parley or conference, typically between Europeans and the Indigenous people of a region, especially in West Africa.” Portuguese palavra and its Castilian counterpart palabra come from Latin parabola “comparison, explanatory illustration,” and in Late Latin (and especially in Christian Latin), “allegorical story, parable, proverb.” Metathesis, the transposition of consonants, is common in Spanish and Portuguese: the syncopated form parabla (from parabola) becomes palavra in Portuguese and palabra in Spanish, just as Latin mirāculum “miracle” becomes milagro in Spanish and milagre in Portuguese. Palaver entered English in the early 18th century.