Word of the Day
frowzy
adjective
dirty and untidy; slovenly.
More about frowzy
Frowzy “dirty and untidy” is of uncertain origin, but that knowledge gap has hardly stopped linguists from speculating. One possible connection is to dialectal British English frowsty “musty; ill-smelling” and frough “brittle, frail,” both of which are also of uncertain origin. However, any or all of these three terms may be related to Old English thróh “rancid; rancor,” which is itself, yet again, of uncertain origin. Unlike the standard or mainstream versions of a language, in which the roots of the majority of the vocabulary are easy to deduce, dialects often remain under-documented, and this causes historical mysteries such as the source of frowzy to emerge every once in a while. Frowzy was first recorded in English circa 1680.
how is frowzy used?
Each year, right about now, I want to declare it Throw-in-the-Trowel-Week, as the aftermath of spring’s tender, joyous effusion goes beyond charmingly fuzzy to just plain frowzy and tattered. The garden has a bad case of what a friend calls “the shaggies” …. It’s looking messy out there. In the second half of June, I’m overcome by the inclination to close my eyes—to make it all disappear in “see no evil” fashion.
In we marched, tramp, tramp. Bayonets took the place of buncombe. The frowzy creatures in ill-made dress-coats, shimmering satin waistcoats, and hats of the tile model, who lounge, spit, and vociferate there,… were off. Our neat uniforms and bright barrels showed to great advantage, compared with the usual costumes of the usual dramatis personae of the scene.
coronach
noun
a song or lamentation for the dead; dirge.
More about coronach
Coronach “a song for the dead” is a borrowing from either Irish Gaelic coránach or Scottish Gaelic corranach, both meaning “dirge.” These two words are compounds of the prefix comh- “together” and Scottish Gaelic rànach “outcry.” If comh- looks a little familiar to you, there’s a good reason for that; comh- is cognate to Latin con- (also co-, col-, com-, cor-), also meaning “together, with.” Irish and Scottish Gaelic are both Celtic languages, which constitute a branch of the Indo-European family; Latin is also an Indo-European language, but it belongs to the Italic branch. As Indo-European languages, Irish and Scottish Gaelic are bound to share numerous cognates with Latin, but the high degree of similarity between the Celtic and Italic branches has prompted some linguists to propose an Italo-Celtic grouping within the Indo-European family. Coronach was first recorded in English in the 1490s.
how is coronach used?
The coronach … is a voluntary tribute of clamant sorrow poured forth over the grave of a chief, or a person preserving sufficient power and benevolence, to protect and shew kindness to those, who, to use our phrase, live under them …. Those who send forth the dismal sounds, do it under the impression of real sorrow, being generally persons who thought none so good or so great as the object of their lamentations.
The chieftain’s march was commonly the first played after they set out, and the last one was peculiarly plaintive […] The women kept behind the men, bewailing at intervals, in broken extempore verses, the dead man; and praising him for his birth, his achievements in war, his activity as a sportsman, and for his generous hospitality and compassion to the distressed. This was called the coronach–i.e., the dirge.
barchan
noun
a crescent-shaped sand dune with the convex side in the direction of the wind.
More about barchan
Barchan “a crescent-shaped sand dune” is a borrowing by way of Russian barkhan from Kazakh barxan, of the same meaning. Kazakh is a member of the Turkic language family, which is found in large pockets from the eastern Mediterranean to central Siberia, as we learned about in the etymology for the recent Word of the Day yurt. Because most Turkic language-speaking countries today were once part of the former USSR, the Russian language has absorbed numerous loanwords from Turkic tongues, from Abkhaz and Azerbaijani in the west of Asia to Kazakh and Kyrgyz in the center. Barchan was first recorded in English in the late 1880s.
how is barchan used?
If Star Wars: The Phantom Menace had an epilogue, you might call it The Barchan Invasion. That’s because a crescent-shaped sand dune called a barchan is slowly swallowing the spot in the Sahara that played Anakin Skywalker’s hometown in the movie. The set, erected outside the Tunisian city of Tozeur and used as a backdrop for the 1999 film—a “prequel” to George Lucas’s wildly popular Star Wars trilogy—has become a pilgrimage site for truly devoted fans .… Eventually, it will roll right over Mos Espa—probably crushing the movie set—and keep on moving.
Smaller barchan dunes often bump into larger ones from behind because they move faster and are carried by winds blowing in one direction …. [W]hen two dunes are close enough in size, they can create the illusion that one slithers right through the other. The slightly smaller one, approaching from behind, swallows so much sand as it begins to fuse with the larger, more sluggish barchan that at some point it becomes bigger. The dune that was initially larger is now small enough to dart away.