Word of the Day
willyard
adjective
Scot. and North England.
obstinate; willful.
More about willyard
Willyard (also spelled willyart) “obstinate, willful” is yet another Scots word designed to confound the English. Even the first syllable, will-, is misleading: it is not the English auxiliary verb will, used, for example, to form the future tense; nor is it the English noun will “the mental faculty, desire, purpose”; it is from the Old Norse adjective villr (stem vill-) “wild, false, bewildered, erring, perplexed, uncertain.” The second syllable, –yard or –yart, is anybody’s guess. Robert Burns uses the word once, “But, O! for Hogarth’s magic pow’r, / To shew Sir Bardie’s willyart glowr” (1786), which guarantees the word’s survival; Sir Walter Scott also used the word in his Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818). Willyard entered English toward the end of the 16th century.
how is willyard used?
“Uh! uh! uh!” ejaculated Dumbiedikes, as he checked the hobbling pace of the pony by our friend Butler. “Uh! uh! it’s a hard-set willyard beast this o’ mine.”
His disposition resembled that of the famous animal who carried Dumbiedikes so long and so well, but of whom Jeanie Deans remarked that he was willyard.
irenic
adjective
tending to promote peace or reconciliation; peaceful or conciliatory.
More about irenic
Irenic “peaceful, conciliatory” comes straight from Greek eirēnikós “belonging to peace,” a derivative of the noun eirḗnē. Eirḗnē was also the name of the Greek goddess of Peace, the name of an 8th-century Byzantine empress, and the name of several Christian saints, whence the English female name Irene. The bewildering number of dialect forms (irā́nā, irḗnā, ireinā, etc.) point to a non-Greek origin. Irenic entered English in the second half of the 19th century.
how is irenic used?
When casual readers of poetry think about Heaney, his Irishness, his charisma, his connection to thousands of years of poetic tradition …, and his irenic political attitudes first come to mind.
After a presidential election that deserves the word it was given in headlines—historic—welcome to the newly irenic but still newsworthy period in American politics that goes by the ancient Latin name of interregnum, “between reigns.”
zeitgeber
noun
an environmental cue, as the length of daylight or the degree of temperature, that helps to regulate the cycles of an organism's biological clock.
More about zeitgeber
Zeitgeber “an environmental cue, such as the length of daylight, that helps regulate the biological clock of an organism,” comes from German Zeitgeber, literally “time giver,” a compound of Zeit “time” (cognate with English tide) and Geber, an agent noun from the verb geben “to give” (cognate with English give). The German term is formed on the analogy of Taktgeber “electronic synchronization device, timer, metronome.” Takt and Zeit are near synonyms except that Takt is more narrowly applied to music and rhythm. Zeitgeber entered English in the late 1950s.
how is zeitgeber used?
Natural light is the best-known, though not the only, zeitgeber that syncs human sleep patterns up with the Earth’s 24-hour day.
Night-shift workers also struggle, he says, because they don’t get the environmental and social cues that help adjust the circadian clock. The most important of these cues, called zeitgebers (German for ”time givers”) is sunlight.