Word of the Day
bucchero
noun
an Etruscan black ceramic ware, often ornamented with incised geometrical patterns or figures carved in relief.
More about bucchero
Bucchero “an Etruscan black ceramic ware” is a borrowing from Italian, though its roots trace back much further. Prior to Italian, bucchero was adapted from Spanish búcaro and, earlier, Portuguese púcaro “clay vessel.” Before Portuguese, púcaro ultimately derives from Latin pōculum “goblet,” but between these two points, the word may have passed through Mozarabic, a variety of Romance once spoken in the south of Spain. Mozarabic was not a language but rather a continuum of dialects descended from Vulgar Latin that developed in the regions of Spain under Moorish control and that Arabic heavily influenced. In this way, Mozarabic was for centuries an intermediary that allowed for numerous terms of Arabic and Latin origin to enter (or, in the case of Latin, to reenter) the Spanish language. Bucchero was first recorded in the late 1880s.
how is bucchero used?
Many scholars believe that the earliest bucchero evolved slowly from a type of impasto pottery made by the latest potters of the Villanovan culture, in other words the people who became the Etruscans. Other experts have noted the strong similarities between certain metallic (and ivory) shapes that may have influenced the development of early bucchero.
Another stellar piece is a circa 550-500BC blackware bucchero kantharos from Etruria. Distinctly burnished, bucchero is considered the signature ceramic of the Etruscans and was mostly used by the elite class. The bucchero offered by Apollo Galleries has been held in several prestigious European collections and was also sold by Christie’s London, in 1998.
quagmire
noun
an area of miry or boggy ground whose surface yields under the tread; a bog.
More about quagmire
Quagmire “an area of miry or boggy ground” is a compound of the nouns quag and mire, both of which are synonyms of quagmire itself. Mire has a clear and well-studied history; it derives from Old Norse mȳrr “bog” and is a doublet, one of a pair of words derived from the same source but through different routes, of moss (from Old English mēos)—much like fjord and the recent Word of the Day firth. The story of quag, though, is far more muddled. Quag appears to be related to its dialectal English synonyms quab and quaw, and all three may be of imitative origin or come from an uncertain Old English source meaning “to shake, tremble.” For the latter hypothesis, the most popular proposal is a connection between quag and the verb quake, as in earthquake and Quaker. Quagmire was first recorded in English in the 1570s.
how is quagmire used?
More than a thousand miles downstream from the Chinese dams, the Mekong Delta’s seemingly endless network of marshes, canals, and polders—tracts of reclaimed land—stretches to the South China Sea. The delta has long been a literal and metaphorical quagmire …. The mix of salt water and freshwater in the delta, and the centuries of human efforts to direct it, have resulted in a complex engineered landscape, one that is too often treated as separate from the rest of the Mekong.
The higher-than-usual temps are also keeping people off lake and river ice, as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have warned people away from such bodies of water. This problem is not new, the Canadian Press points out. Supply trucks were stranded in 2010 … as winter roads thawed into muddy quagmires, prompting a few aboriginal chiefs to declare a state of emergency.
transcendental
adjective
abstract or metaphysical.
More about transcendental
Transcendental “abstract or metaphysical” ultimately derives by way of Medieval Latin from the Latin verb trānscendere “to surmount,” a compound of the preposition trāns “across, beyond” and the verb scandere “to climb.” Trāns is a distant cognate of the English terms thorough and through; as we learned from the Word of the Day togated, because of a phenomenon known as Grimm’s law, Latin t often corresponds to English th. The opposite of trāns is cis “on this side.” The verb scandere (with stems including scand-, scans-, scend-, scens-, and scent-) is the source of terms such as ascension, descent, and scansorial “capable of or adapted for climbing.” Transcendental was first recorded in English circa 1620.
how is transcendental used?
It was raining, and our orchestra was warming up to play with a celebrated conductor in Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains, steps from the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne …. I felt a transcendental whoosh of history and emotional connection with my surroundings, and as I drew purposefully scratchy sounds from my instrument … I kept my eyes locked on our guest maestro, a man of my parents’ generation who had likely shared colleagues with them.