Word of the Day
feijoada
noun
a dish of rice and black beans baked with various kinds of meat and sausage.
More about feijoada
Feijoada “a dish of rice, black beans, and meat” is a borrowing from Brazilian Portuguese and a derivative of Portuguese feijão “bean.” Feijaõ, along with its cognates in other Iberian languages (e.g., Galician freixó and Spanish frijol), comes from Latin fasēlus, which refers to a legume such as the cowpea or the kidney bean. Fasēlus is itself an adaptation of Ancient Greek phásēlos, which linguists hypothesize derives from a Mediterranean substrate. As we learned from the recent Word of the Day spelunk, a substrate is a language that goes extinct once another language intrudes where it is spoken—but not before contributing substantial vocabulary to the intruding language. In this case, phásēlos was likely a word that existed in a now-lost language spoken thousands of years ago in what is now Greece before the Indo-Europeans migrated there from western Asia. Feijoada was first recorded in English in the early 1940s.
how is feijoada used?
Brazilians eat black beans (feijão preto) with almost every meal, and they’re an important ingredient in feijoada, a bean-and-pork stew that’s largely considered the South American country’s national dish. To protect these bean varieties for the future, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (known as Embrapa) sent 514 samples to Svalbard. The selection represents a “microcosm” of all the black bean types in the country.
The shift away from animal-based protein is mainly being driven by health concerns, experts say.… A few years ago, giving up meat was unthinkable for the vast majority of Brazilians. Feijoada, the national dish, is a stew made with beans and pork. Weekend outdoor cookouts in which families and friends gather for hours over generous spreads of steak, chicken and sausage are a revered ritual across the country.
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.