Word of the Day
persnickety
adjective
overparticular; fussy.
More about persnickety
Persnickety “overparticular, fussy” is a variant of pernickety, a Scottish English word of uncertain origin. Per- is a common prefix in expressive words in the Scots language, such as perjink “exact, neat, trim,” perskeet “fastidious,” and perjinkity “exact detail,” all of which are similar in meaning to persnickety. One hypothesis is that persnickety and pernickety are compounds of this prefix per- and the noun nick “small notch, hollow place” or a diminutive of nick such as nickett. Alternatively, persnickety could be related to the adjective snickety, also meaning “fussy,” or to the noun snicket “passageway between walls or fences,” but the connection is unclear. The final theory is that persnickety and pernickety are heavily corrupted variants or fusions of particular “exceptionally selective” and finicky “excessively fastidious.” Persnickety was first recorded in English in the late 1880s.
how is persnickety used?
Many of the women (and a few men) were tourist attractions in their own right, with visitors flocking to the hotel as much to glimpse a quirky widow as to see the Pulitzer Fountain or to have a drink in the Oak Room. The Plaza staff grew accustomed to the widows’ peculiarities. One hotel manager began walking outside to get from one end of the building to the other, to avoid passing through the lobby, where persnickety widows would invariably be positioned on the divans, ready to greet him with a barrage of complaints.
tesseract
noun
the generalization of a cube to four dimensions.
More about tesseract
Tesseract “a four-dimensional cube” derives from Ancient Greek tésseres (also téttares) “four,” which is also the source of tessellate “to form small squares,” after the number of sides in a square, and the combining form tetra- “four,” as in tetrahedron, a figure with four faces, and tetralogy, a series of four related books or films. Tésseres comes from the Proto-Indo-European root kwetwer-, which is the source of English four, forty, fortnight, and farthing and Latin quattuor and quadri- “four” (as in quatrain, a four-line poem, and quad, a four-sided common space), quārtus “fourth” (as in quarter, which is one-fourth of a dollar), and quater “four times” (as in quaternary “consisting of four”). Tesseract was first recorded in English in the late 1880s.
how is tesseract used?
The robot is building a tesseract. He motions at a glowing cube floating before him, and an identical cube emerges. He drags it to the left, but the two cubes stay connected, strung together by glowing lines radiating from their corners. The robot lowers its hands, and the cubes coalesce into a single shape—with 24 square faces, 16 vertices, and eight connected cubes existing in four dimensions. A tesseract. This isn’t a video game. It’s a classroom. And the robot is Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia University and bestselling author of several popular science books.
cenotaph
noun
a sepulchral monument erected in memory of a deceased person whose body is buried elsewhere.
More about cenotaph
Cenotaph “a monument erected in memory of a person buried elsewhere” derives by way of Latin cenotaphium from Ancient Greek kenotáphion, literally meaning “empty tomb,” from kenós “empty” and táphos “tomb.” A common misconception is that the ceno- element of cenotaph is related to the identical combining forms ceno- (also caeno- or caino-) “new” and ceno- (also coeno-) “common,” but despite the resemblance, there is no connection. The diphthongs ai and oi in Ancient Greek, which were adapted as ae and oe in Latin, both frequently become e in American English, which can easily result in homonyms—words that sound and are spelled the same but are unrelated. A similar example occurred with the element pedo- in pedology, which can mean “soil science” when pedo- is derived from Ancient Greek pédon “soil,” or can mean “the study of child development” when pedo- is derived from Ancient Greek paîs (stem paid-) “child.” Cenotaph was first recorded at the turn of the 17th century.
how is cenotaph used?
Archaeologists said on Friday they had discovered an ancient cenotaph that almost certainly commemorated the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus, buried in the heart of the Italian capital. The small chamber containing a simple sarcophagus and round stone block was originally found at the start of the last century beneath the Capitoline Hill inside the old Roman forum.