Word of the Day
intercalate
verb (used with object)
to insert (an extra day, month, etc.) in the calendar.
More about intercalate
Intercalate “to insert an extra day in the calendar” is based on the Latin verb intercalāre, of the same meaning, which is a compound of the preposition inter “between, among” and the verb calāre “to proclaim.” Though calāre looks and sounds quite a bit like English call, the two are not related; Grimm’s law shows that Latin c tends to correspond to Old English h, while Old English c is equivalent to Latin g. In this way, Latin calāre is related to Old English hlōwan “to roar,” becoming English low “to moo.” Meanwhile, English call may be related to Latin gallus “rooster.” Intercalate was first recorded in English circa 1610.
how is intercalate used?
Chinese New Year, like Passover, Rosh Hashanah and all Jewish holidays, pops up at various times each year within two months of the Gregorian calendar (January and February), because the Chinese calendar, like the Hebrew calendar, is based on the Metonic cycle, a lunisolar calendar that intercalates an extra month seven times in a 19-year cycle (as opposed to the Gregorian, with its months of varying lengths and its additional day every four years).
Once the existence and the length of the fraction of a day has been discovered, this difficulty can be corrected, as it is in our calendar, by intercalating a single day at regular intervals, but the discovery requires very precise methods of measurement, and throughout antiquity only approximate values for the fraction were known.
hoary
adjective
tedious from familiarity; stale.
More about hoary
Hoary “tedious from familiarity” is an adjective based on the noun hoar “frost, a grayish-white,” which is of Germanic origin. Because English and German are both Germanic languages, hoary has two cognates in German—hehr “sublime, noble” and Herr “gentleman, sir, mister”—that show a shift in definition from gray hair alone to words of respect for gray-haired individuals. From there, there are at least three possibilities for the ultimate origin of hoary: one hypothesis connects hoary to the same root for color-related words that gives rise to hue, a second option links hoary to an ancient root meaning “to shine,” and a third proposes that hoary shares a source with obscure (via Latin), shadow (via Old English), and the recent Word of the Day sciamachy (via Ancient Greek). Hoary was first recorded in English in the 1520s.
how is hoary used?
It’s a hoary old debate: how much do our genes define how we grow and learn, and how much is due to the environment? A new study by [Augustine] Kong and colleagues shows that parents’ genes, even those not passed on to children, have major effects on kids’ health and educational attainment.
Webster included [in the dictionary] new American words like “subsidize” and “caucus,” and left out hoary Britishisms like “fishefy.” John Quincy Adams, the future president, was shocked by the “local vulgarisms,” and doubted that Harvard, of which he was a trustee, would ever endorse such a radical “departure from the English language.”
chagrin
noun
a feeling of vexation, marked by disappointment or humiliation.
More about chagrin
The story of chagrin “a feeling of vexation” is a rather mysterious one, and the linguistic community is at odds over the word’s origin. One proposal is that chagrin comes from obsolete dialectal French chagraigner or chagreiner “to distress, sadden,” perhaps from Old French graim “sorrowful,” which is related to German Gram “sadness,” combined with Old French chat “cat,” a common metaphorical element in terms related to distress. The other major hypothesis is that chagrin is the same as the French homonym chagrin “rough skin, shagreen,” a variant of sagrin, from Turkish sağrι “rump of a horse.” Chagrin was first recorded in English in the 1650s.
how is chagrin used?
If you’ve wondered why the blizzard dumping snow on the Northeast has a name, look no further than The Weather Channel. At the start of this storm season, the 24-hour-weather network announced, much to the chagrin of The National Weather Service, that it would give names to winter storms.
He knew keenly Lillian would feel the disgrace, and feared that her shame and chagrin might be so great that she would never write him or look him in the face again. What could he do to lessen the great embarrassment that he knew she must feel.