Word of the Day

Verbicide, “the willful distortion of the original meaning of a word; a person who willfully distorts the meaning of a word,” comes from Latin verbum “word” and the English suffix -cide, a borrowing of the Latin suffixes -cīda “killer” and -cīdium “act of killing,” derivatives of the verb caedere “to cut down, strike, kill.” The willful distortion is usually something as harmless as a pun, or the weakening of the meanings of words like awful, awesome, divine, and ghastly (which occurs in all languages), as opposed to the perversion of language, especially political language, condemned by everyone from Thucydides in the 5th century b.c., to George Orwell in the mid-20th century. Verbicide entered English in the first half of the 19th century.

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.

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 This original, literal meaning is obsolete today.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.

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.”

The grammatical and rhetorical term zeugma “the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words when it is appropriate to only one of them,” is a favorite of grammar enthusiasts (if of no one else). Zeugma appears once in Old English (spelled zeuma, a Medieval Latin spelling) in the Enchiridion (“Handbook”), a scientific and mathematical textbook by the Anglo-Saxon scholar Byrhtferth of Ramsey (c.970-c.1020). Byrhtferth only defines zeuma and translates it into Old English (gefeig “a joining”). Zeuma next appears three times in an anonymous Middle English grammatical treatise from the mid-15th century. The author defines zeuma and gives easy examples in Latin. Zeugma comes via Latin zeugma from Greek zeûgma “something used for joining, a yoking, a bond, zeugma” a derivative of the verb zeugnýnai “to yoke, bind fast.”