Word of the Day

Mellifluous comes from Late Latin mellifluus “flowing with honey, (of a taste or scent) sweetened with or as if with honey,” and by extension “eloquent, persuasive.” Mellifluus is a compound of mel (inflectional stem mell-) “honey” and -fluus “flowing,” a derivative of fluere “to flow.” Mel is the Latin result of the Proto-Indo-European melit “honey,” which in Greek appears as méli (inflectional stem mélit-). Melit- corresponds exactly with Hittite milit (from melit), Old Irish mil (also from melit). In the Germanic languages, an expanded form, melitom, yields Gothic milith “honey,” Old English mildēaw, meledēaw “honey dew, nectar” (in English, the mil- of mildew, which was thought to be distilled or condensed from air like dew). Mellifluous entered English in the 14th century.

Festinate, a verb meaning “to hurry, hasten,” comes from Latin festīnātus, the past participle of the verb festīnāre “to make haste, hasten, hurry.” One of the emperor Augustus’s homely sayings was festīnā lentē “make haste slowly.” Festīnāre comes from the Latin root festi-, from an unrecorded Italic root ferst-, from the uncommon Proto-Indo-European root bheres-, bhers- “quick,” source of Irish bras and Welsh brys, both meaning “quick.” In Slavic, bhers- appears in the Polish adverb bardzo “very,” Czech brzo, brzý “early, soon,” and Russian borzóĭ “quick, swift,” also the name of a Russian breed of wolfhound. Festinate entered English as an adverb at the end of the 16th century, and as a verb in the mid-17th.

The Latin adverb quondam, “formerly, anciently, once (upon a time)," has been used in English as a noun, “the former holder of an office,” as an adverb meaning “formerly, at one time,” and, currently and solely, as an adjective meaning “former, onetime.” All three usages in English occur close together in the first half of the 16th century. Quondam breaks down to the adverbial conjunction cum or quom “at the time that, when.” The particle -dam, however, is of uncertain origin.

The adverb spang, “directly, exactly, right-on,” dates from the second half of the 18th century. All of its etymologies are speculative. Most has all the markings of an Americanism, but its first (and clearest) occurrence is in a burlesque version of the Iliad by English humorist Thomas Bridges: “Sometimes a brickbat with a bump, / Came spang against his heavy rump.”

Blatherskite “one who is given to voluble, empty talk,” which dates from the middle of the 19th century, was originally and remains mostly an Americanism. Blatherskite is a variant of Scottish bletherskate, which dates from the mid-17th century and is a compound of the verb blether or blather “to talk nonsense” and the Anglo-American slang word skate “person, contemptible person, broken-down horse.” Another variant, bladderskate, appears in the traditional Scottish song "Maggie Lauder," which was popular among American soldiers during the American Revolution.