Word of the Day
John Hancock
noun
a person's signature: Put your John Hancock on this check.
More about John Hancock
John Hancock (1737–93) was a prominent American patriot, statesman, and merchant, mostly unknown today except for his magnificent signature. Hancock served as president of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia when the Declaration of Independence was approved (not signed) on July 4, 1776. Hancock’s signature on the Declaration became an American colloquialism for a personal signature in the mid-19th century.
how is John Hancock used?
Let’s sign the contract right now.… Put down your John Hancock, and begin to draw the ole salary from this minute, with a month’s vacation pay!
“Handwriting can, does, and often will change due to moods, major life changes, and stress,” McKnight says, adding that pregnancy can affect your John Hancock, too.
paradisiacal
adjective
of, like, or befitting paradise.
More about paradisiacal
Paradisiacal comes from the Late Latin adjective paradīsiacus “pertaining to heaven, pertaining to the Garden of Eden,” a word appearing only in Christian authors. Paradīsiacus is a derivative of the noun paradīsus “a park,” and in Christian authors, “paradise.” Paradīsus is a borrowing of the Greek noun parádeisos, which first appears in the works of the Athenian historian and essayist Xenophon (c430-350 b.c.), meaning “enclosed park or pleasure ground with animals (for hunting),” and always referring to the grounds of Persian kings and nobles. In later authors parádeisos simply meant “garden, orchard.” By the time of the Septuagint (the oldest Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, translated in the 3rd and 2nd centuries b.c.), parádeisos referred to the Garden of Eden (as in Genesis 2:8). In the Gospels parádeisos means “the abode of the blessed, heaven.” Parádeisos is a Greek borrowing from Avestan pairidaēza “enclosure,” literally “walled around.” (Avestan is the ancient East Iranian language of the Zoroastrian scriptures.) Paradisiacal entered English in the 17th century.
how is paradisiacal used?
… the proximity to the Tols, a range of inland mountains, created otherworldly climates which were sometimes paradisiacal, sometimes demoniacal, always one extreme or the other.
Unlike our paradisiacal, blue-and-white Earth, the moon has no atmosphere and no real sky—just gray dust and black space, such that color photographs from moonwalks appear mostly black and white, as though someone colorized the American flags after the fact.
tmesis
noun
the interpolation of one or more words between the parts of a compound word, as be thou ware for beware.
More about tmesis
Tmesis is not a misspelling of thesis; tmêsis “cutting” is a Greek noun, a derivative of the verb témnein “to cut, prune, castrate.” Tmesis is a feature of the archaic epic syntax of the Iliad and Odyssey, in which there is a separation of an adverb (which becomes a prefix in Classical Greek) from its verb by an intervening word or phrase, as in the Iliad en d’autòs edýseto nṓropa chalkòn “… and he himself put on his gleaming bronze,” where the adverb en is separated from its verb edýseto by the phrase d’autòs “and he himself.” Tmesis is rare and archaic in modern English, as in “Of whom be thou ware also; for he hath greatly withstood our words” (that is, “Beware of him, yourself…”), 2 Timothy 4:15, Authorized Version. More than a few of us may admit familiarity with tmesis as it occurs in such adjectives as fantastic or unbelievable or in adverbs like absolutely, in which the fan-, un-, and abso– are separated from the rest of the word by an overworked vulgarism.
how is tmesis used?
You may remember Matt Foley, the in-your-face motivational speaker played by the late comedian Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live, whose “Well, la-dee-frickin’-da” was all the funnier for its tmesis.
Tmesis … means the insertion of one word into the middle of another word, as in abso-bloody-lutely or to-very-day. Most often we insert four-letter expletives, which cannot be printed in a newspaper but can only be suggested by substituting something like the British “bloody.”