Word of the Day
laisser-aller
noun
unchecked freedom or ease; unrestraint; looseness.
More about laisser-aller
Laisser-aller “unchecked freedom or ease” is a direct borrowing from French, in which the phrase means “to allow to go.” Laisser “to let, allow” ultimately comes from Latin laxus “loose,” which is the source of English relax, release, and relish and is a distant cognate of English slack “not tight.” The story of aller “to go” is a bit more complicated. Aller is a suppletive verb, which means that several of its inflected forms originated as borrowings from other words; while the infinitive form aller may derive either from a Celtic source or from Latin ambulāre “to walk,” the present and future forms vais “I go” and irai “I will go” come from Latin vādere and īre, respectively, both of which mean “to go.” In English, one common suppletive verb is go (with its past tense form, went, borrowed from wend “to proceed”), and suppletion is found as well with the adjectives good and bad (with comparative forms better and worse and superlative forms best and worst derived from different roots). Laisser-aller was first recorded in English in the early 19th century.
how is laisser-aller used?
Zoom dressing is “something the French worry about,” said Manon Renault, an expert in the sociology of fashion. “Especially Parisians, who feel they represent elegance.” And while a certain laisser-aller recently had the conservative weekly Madame Figaro fretting about whether home-wear habits would drag fashion “into a tailspin,” interviews with a range of Parisians suggest a compromise of sorts had been reached.
Alvanley had a delightful recklessness and laisser aller in everything. His manner of putting out his light at night was not a very pleasant one for his host for the time being. He always read in bed, and when he wanted to go to sleep he either extinguished his candle by throwing it on the floor in the middle of the room, and taking a shot at it with the pillow, or else quietly placed it, when still lighted, under the bolster.
More about ichnite
Ichnite “a fossil footprint” is a compound of the combining form ichno- “track, footstep” and the suffix -ite, which is often found in terms for minerals and fossils. Ichno- derives from Ancient Greek íchnos “track,” which is of uncertain origin, though hypotheses that lack wide acceptance include connections to Ancient Greek oíkhomai “to go away, leave, disappear,” to various Slavic words related to bodily wounds and cavities, and to Ancient Greek aikhmḗ “spear point.” Perhaps the best-known derivation of íchnos, for those of you with a passion for Ancient Greek literature, is Ichneutae, the name of a play by Sophocles that is also known variously as Searchers or Trackers in English. Ichnite was first recorded in English in the early 1850s.
how is ichnite used?
In most cases, a fossil footprint, also known as an ichnite, represents evidence that has not moved over time while a bone or tooth could have been transported to the site under study and therefore be out of context .… A footprint or ichnite can reflect the basic shape of the dinosaur’s foot, the number of toes, and to some extent, the mechanics of how the dinosaur carried its weight.
Just as trackways consisting of true footprints in many cases may end in a particular ichnite for reasons that are not obvious, … they may be so faint that the researcher has difficulties drawing accurate print outlines …. The basic features of the ichnites in La Rioja are simple. Tetrapod footprints made by turtles, pterosaurs, crocodiles, and dinosaurs have been found.
pinyin
noun
a system for transliterating Chinese into the Latin alphabet: introduced in 1958 and adopted as the official system of romanization by the People's Republic of China in 1979.
More about pinyin
Pinyin “a system for transliterating Chinese into the Latin alphabet” is a borrowing from Mandarin Chinese pīnyīn, a compound of pīn “to arrange, classify” and yīn “sound, pronunciation.” Because Chinese uses a writing system that is logographic (using symbols to indicate words) there are numerous methods that linguists have developed to romanize Chinese, that is, to transliterate the language into the Roman alphabet. While pinyin is the most popular today, the Wade–Giles and Yale systems were widespread in China throughout the 20th century. With place names specifically, the so-called “postal spellings” were used to render names such as Peking and Nanking into English. After pinyin’s adoption as the official standard of romanization in 1979, a wave of transliteration swept through China, and the most recognizable effects were the changes in place names, such as the switch from Peking and Nanking to their pinyin versions Běijīng and Nánjīng. Pinyin was first recorded in English in the mid-20th century.
how is pinyin used?
Pinyin, which was adopted by China in 1958, gave readers unfamiliar with Chinese characters a crucial tool to understand how to pronounce them. These characters do not readily disclose information on how to say them aloud—but with such a system as Pinyin, those characters more easily and clearly yield their meaning when converted into languages like English and Spanish, which use the Roman alphabet. While it was not the first system to Romanize Chinese, Pinyin has become the most widely accepted.
As Beijing welcomed 2022, residents in the Chinese capital noticed a subtle shift taking place in the city’s subway: on signs, the English word “station” has been replaced with “Zhan,” the pinyin, or romanized version, of the Chinese character. And in some cases, English station names such as Olympic Park and Terminal 2 of the Beijing airport have become “Aolinpike Gongyuan” and “2 Hao Hangzhanlou”—though the English translations are still displayed in brackets underneath.