Word of the Day
flageolet
noun
a small end-blown flute with four finger holes in front and two in the rear.
More about flageolet
Flageolet “a small end-blown flute” comes from Old French flajolet, which comprises flajol “flute” and the diminutive suffix -et. Flajol is originally a word from the Provençal language, also known as Occitan, which was once widely spoken throughout what is now southern France and still survives thanks to language revitalization efforts. Ultimately, flageolet may come from the Latin verb flāre “to blow,” which is the source of deflate, inflate, and even flavor. Because Latin f tends to correspond to English b, cognates of flageolet in English include blow, blast, and perhaps bladder and blather, the latter two from a Germanic source roughly translated as “something blown up.” Flageolet was first recorded in English in the 1650s.
how is flageolet used?
Beginning with a few flutes that he used for a children’s program, Mr. [Trevor] Wye, a collector of rare and unusual flutes, gradually developed a program he called “Afflatus.” In it, he uses 40 different types of flutes, which he plays one after another, including the rare “triple flageolet” and a flute that catches fire…
More about vexillology
Vexillology “the study of flags” is a compound of the Latin noun vexillum “flag” and the combining form -logy, which indicates the study of a subject and is of Ancient Greek origin. Vexillum (also spelled vēxillum) is a diminutive of vēlum “sail, covering,” making vexillum literally mean “little sail.” The reason why vexillum, rather than a word such as “vēlillum,” is the diminutive of vēlum is likely because of the recent Word of the Day syncope, or the loss of a sound from the middle of a word. Vēlum probably was once pronounced like “vexlum” in the early days of Latin, and the x was eventually dropped—but not before the stem vex- could be combined with the suffix -illum to create vexillum. If that sounds a little odd, bear in mind that English lord comes from Old English hlāfweard “loaf-keeper,” which shed half its consonants! Vexillology was coined in the late 1950s.
how is vexillology used?
Of the millions of pages of documents and reports generated by the first moon landing, none is more telling, to me anyway, than an eleven-page paper [“Where No Flag Has Gone Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon”] presented at the twenty-sixth annual meeting of the North American Vexillological Association. Vexillology is the study of flags, not the study of vexing things, but in this case, either would fit.
Whitney Smith, who turned a childhood fascination with flags into a scholarly discipline—vexillology—of which he was the leading light, … coined the term vexillology, combining the Latin word for flag, “vexillum,” with the Greek suffix meaning “the study of.” “I’ve been criticized because it combines Latin and Greek, a barbarism,” he told Smithsonian, “but I say, ‘I was a teenager!’”
volplane
verb (used without object)
to glide toward the earth in an airplane, with no motor power or with the power shut off.
More about volplane
Volplane “to glide toward the earth in an airplane with no power” is an adaptation of the French noun vol plané “glided flight.” French vol can mean either “flight” or “theft” depending on the context, which gives the name of the nearly invincible villain Voldemort from the Harry Potter series the double meaning of “flight from death” or “theft of death.” Vol comes from the Latin verb volāre “to fly,” which is the source of volatile as well as the recent Word of the Day volant. French plané is the past participle of planer “to glide,” which ultimately comes from the Latin adjective plānus “flat,” likely in reference to how gliding is a horizontal motion. Of course, airplane is related to volplane, but airplane comes instead by way of the French adjective plan “flat.” Volplane was first recorded in English between 1905 and 1910.
how is volplane used?
So cleverly did he [Frank H. Burnside, an experienced pilot] bring the disabled aircraft around in a graceful spiral, coming head-on into the wind to volplane safely into the mouth of a broad inlet, that the explorer [Rear-Admiral Robert E. Peary] knew nothing of the accident until he was told the flying-boat would have to be towed ashore.
The next time [Harriet] Quimby made headlines in 1912, it was in the screaming, sensational font of disaster too. While flying her new 70-horsepower Bleriot monoplane during a Boston airshow, the 37-year-old Quimby hit turbulence. “Heading back into the eight mile gusty wind, Miss Quimby started to volplane,” recounted The Rock Island Argus.