Word of the Day
prevaricate
verb (used without object)
to speak falsely or misleadingly; deliberately misstate or create an incorrect impression; lie.
More about prevaricate
Prevaricate, “to deliberately speak falsely,” comes from the Latin verb praevāricārī “to straddle something,” based on prae “before” and vārus “bent outwards, bow-legged.” Potential relatives of vārus include varius “speckled, diverse” (as in variety, various, and vary) and varix “dilated vein” (as in varicose). However, because of the simple difference in vowel length between the long ā in vārus and the short a in varius and varix, the linguistic community largely isn’t convinced that all three are related. Prevaricate was first recorded in English circa 1580.
how is prevaricate used?
Prevaricate. Equivocate. Fib. Call it what you like, it’s still lying. And lying, as everyone knows, is just bad and wrong.
Cottagers, commuters and rural-weekend escape artists are a bunch of liars. I know because I am one. I’ve shamelessly prevaricated with the best of them all summer long…
geitonogamy
noun
pollination of a flower by pollen from another flower on the same plant.
More about geitonogamy
Geitonogamy “self-pollination of a flower” is a compound based on Ancient Greek geítōn “neighbor” and the combining form -gamy “marriage, union, fertilization.” The form -gamy, in turn, is based on Ancient Greek -gamía “act of marrying” (from gámos “marriage”) and appears in terms such as allogamy (literally “self-marriage”), bigamy (“marriage twice”), endogamy (“marriage within”), exogamy (“marriage outside”), monogamy (“alone marriage”), and polygamy (“many marriage”). Using Latin instead, the Latin equivalent of geitonogamy would be the rather lengthy “vicinimatrimony” or “vicininuptials.” Geitonogamy was first recorded in English in the late 1870s.
how is geitonogamy used?
In general, geitonogamy increases as a pollinator visits more flowers on a plant. For example, consider the destinations of pollen removed from the first of five flowers visited by a pollinator on a plant…
de novo
adverb
anew; afresh; again; from the beginning.
More about de novo
De novo “anew, from the beginning” is a loan from Latin that comprises dē “from, of, about” and novō, a form of novus “new.” In English, only pronouns change in form to indicate case, such as subject (I, we), possessive (my, our), and object (me, us) pronouns. In Latin, however, nouns and adjectives also change their endings according to case. In this way, novus is the subject, novī is the possessive, novum is the direct object, and novō is both the indirect and prepositional object. All these are only the masculine singular forms, however; almost two dozen other forms exist in the plural number and the feminine and neuter genders. No wonder that modern Romance languages decided to simplify things a bit! De novo was first recorded in English in the 1620s.
how is de novo used?
Thiamine originates in the lowest levels of the food web, where particular species of bacteria, phytoplankton, fungi, and plants synthesize the compound de novo… by assembling and linking existing compounds into vitamin B1, which naturally occurs in multiple forms.
In other words, even though a federal court might not review a person’s disenrollment from their tribe, it can still review the exclusion de novo and, in the process, apply the protections afforded by the federal Bill of Rights.