Word of the Day
abient
adjective
tending to move away from a stimulus or situation.
More about abient
Abient “tending to move away from a stimulus or situation” comes from the Latin term abiēns (stem abient-) “going away,” the present participle of the verb abīre “to go away, exit, depart.” Abīre is formed from the preposition ab “from, away” and the verb īre “to go,” which has two stems: -ient and -it. The verb īre also gives rise to ambīre “to go around,” inīre “to go into, begin,” and trānsīre “to go across, cross,” and to see evidence of all these Latin verbs in English today, compare ambient and ambition, initial and initiate, and transient and transit. The -it stem also pops up in circuit (from Latin circumīre “to go round, circle”), exit (from exīre “to go out”), and even obituary (from obīre “to go toward,” often used euphemistically in the sense “to meet one’s death”). Abient was first recorded in English in the early 1930s.
how is abient used?
In the case of negative affect, the motivating experience can be best described, not as punishing, but as experience that tends to be psychologically noxious and difficult to tolerate. Such experience instigates abient behavior—behavior that tends to produce avoidance and to reduce attention to and/or communion with the object of the affect when there is an object.
To avoid writing, I engage in abient behavior: walking the dog, cleaning the floor, ironing T-shirts, or reading junk mail.
jornada
noun
a full day's travel across a desert without a stop for taking on water.
More about jornada
Jornada “a full day’s travel across a desert” is a loanword from Spanish, and prior to Spanish, the term derived via Occitan, a language once widely spoken in southern France, from a Vulgar Latin word akin to diurnāta “a day’s time, day’s work,” from Latin diurnus “daily.” Though some modern Romance languages derive their words for “day” from the Latin noun diēs “day” (compare Portuguese dia, Romanian zi, and Spanish día), others base their words for “day” on the adjective diurnus (compare French jour, Italian giorno, and Occitan jorn). Both diēs and diurnus come from the Proto-Indo-European root dyeu- “to shine; sky, heaven,” which is also the ultimate source of the recent Words of the Day toujours perdrix, circadian, and jovial. Jornada was first recorded in English in the 1650s.
how is jornada used?
Last night around the campfire Pattie had explained that when they rolled out this morning it might take as much as two and a half days, if they were unlucky, a double Jornada, to travel from the banks of the Arkansas to the Cimarron. And between the two rivers, he warned, the landscape would change dramatically. For sixty or seventy miles there would be nothing but an immense barren plain—nothing at all, no wood and no water, not a stream, not a creek, not a puddle, not a drip of spit (he said) until they reached either the Cimarron River, which was itself often dry, or a spot just to the north of it called the Lower Springs.
The terrain was thick with cholla and clumps of it clung to the horses with spikes that would drive through a boot-sole to the bones within and a wind came up through the hills and all night it sang with a wild viper sound through that countless reach of spines. They rode on and the land grew more spare and they reached the first of a series of jornadas where there would be no water at all and there they camped.
ballyhoo
noun
a clamorous and vigorous attempt to win customers or advance any cause; blatant advertising or publicity.
More about ballyhoo
Ballyhoo “blatant advertising or publicity” is a word with an unclear etymology. The word is an Americanism, meaning that it originated in the collection of dialects of English spoken in the United States, and along with fellow Americanisms such as hobo, jazz, and jitney, ballyhoo’s origins are obscure—though, of course, there abound several theories with varying degrees of probability. One proposal relates to ballyhoo’s earlier, now obsolete sense of “speech by a show presenter that boastfully advertises a performance,” which connects ballyhoo to carnival and circus lingo. From here, if this hypothesis holds weight, ballyhoo could be a shortened form of ballyhooly “Hell,” perhaps named rather unaffectionately after a village in northern County Cork, Ireland: the logic here is that, following the pattern of the phrase to raise hell, ballyhooly was clipped at the end and narrowed in definition from “Hell” to “clamor, outcry” and then again to “showman’s speech.” Other hypotheses about the origins of ballyhoo include an inversion of the elements that form hullabaloo “uproar.” Ballyhoo was first recorded in English in the 1830s.
how is ballyhoo used?
As a young man, William worked for a logging company on Vancouver Island, cycling 30 miles after a long day of physical labour. He qualified for the 1928 Olympics at Amsterdam …. [He] turned professional the following year, ending his Olympic career, becoming a popular figure in the sporting culture. He was even romantically linked to Countess Fern Andra, a beauty of German silent movies and friend of the spy Mata Hari. The romance likely was a bit of promotional ballyhoo.
Barely a decade ago, the New York men’s wear presentations merited their own dedicated week with all the attendant ballyhoo, parties, corporate sponsorships and street-style photographers trawling for Instagram fodder. People turned out in droves, disporting themselves in outlandish costumes …. Plenty of schlock was produced during those weeks …