Word of the Day

Nescience, “lack of knowledge, ignorance,” comes straight from Late Latin nescientia, a noun formed from nescient-, the stem of nesciēns, the present participle of nescīre “to be ignorant, not to know,” and the Latin (and Greek) noun suffix -ia. In Latin (and other archaic Indo-European languages, with the exception of Greek), ne- was the original negative for sentences: thus the pair sciō “I know,” and nesciō “I don’t know.” The usual sentence negative in Classical Latin is nōn, probably from earlier noenum "not one (thing)," itself a strengthening of ne with oenum (Classical Latin ūnum). Something similar happened in English, the adverb not being a reduced form of nought (also naught), a compound of the negative adverb ne and the noun wiht “thing, wight.” Nescience entered English in the first half of the 17th century.

Macushla is a phonetic English spelling of the Erse (Irish Gaelic) mo chuisle, literally “my pulse,” or translated more romantically, “my heartbeat, my sweetheart, darling.” The mo-, ma- in macushla, mo chuisle means “my”; cushla, chuisle “pulse, heartbeat, vein,” comes from an earlier Erse cuisle, of uncertain etymology, but most likely a borrowing of Latin pulsus “striking, beating, pulse.” Cuisle appears in another Irish idiom: a chuisle “my dear, darling,” in full, a chuisle mo chroí, literally, “pulse of my heart.” (The phrase Mother Machree “Mother dear” entered English in the first half of the 19th century.) The a is the Gaelic vocative particle, a particle used in direct address, and equivalent to English exclamation O. Chroí “heart” comes from Old Irish crid-, which closely resembles Welsh craidd, Latin cord-, Greek kard-, and Hittite karts, all meaning “heart.” Macushla entered English in the first half of the 19th century.

The Yiddish adjective haimish (also spelled heimish) means “cozy, comfortable, unpretentious,” pretty much the same as English homey. Heimish comes from the Middle High German adjective heimisch (German heimisch), a compound of the Middle High German noun heim “home,” from Proto-Germanic haimaz, the same source as Old English hām (English home). The adjective suffix -ish comes from Proto-Germanic -iska-, source of English -ish. The Proto-Germanic suffix is related to the Greek suffix -iskos, used to form diminutive nouns such as neanískos “youth,” a diminutive of neanías “young man.” Heimish entered English in the mid-1950s.

The adverb lickety-split, “at great speed; rapidly,” was originally and remains mostly a colloquialism. The origin of lickety is fanciful—an extension of lick “to move quickly, run at full speed.” And split means “fraction,” as in split second. Lickety-split entered English in the first half of the 19th century.

Flummoxed, “utterly bewildered or confused,” ought to leave you flummoxed. The word is a colloquialism, the past participle or adjective of the verb flummox, where the trail turns cold. Flummox has no firm etymology, but it may come from or be akin to British dialect (Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Cheshire, all of which border on Wales) flummox, flummocks “to hack, to mangle,” or the noun flummock “a sloven,” or the verb flummock “to confuse, bewilder.” The verb, spelled flummux’d, first appears in 1833 in England with the meaning “backed down, backed out of a promise, disappointed.”