Archives: Lexical geekeries

This one has con­fused me for a long time. I’m famil­iar with a lot of dif­fer­ent uses of this by itself and as a modifier,…

Fun­ny, I always thought that this meant pret­ty much its antonym; in the def­i­n­i­tion *relat­ing to prose* I assumed «prover­bial» or «wor­thy of being written…

This word has pret­ty broad areas of usage, which intrigued me into look­ing it up. Remit comes from the Latin *mit­to* which means to throw,…

So wicked as to war­rant cor­po­ral pun­ish­ment; scan­dalous. I came across this word in a ren­di­tion of an inter­ac­tive the­saurus. The exam­ple key­word was “bad.”…

Moral cor­rup­tion or vile nature. In 1953, bio­chemist Alex B. Novikof­f’s tenure was revoked and he was dis­missed from his posi­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of…

To throw out of a win­dow. It is hum­bling that I had to look up a word that I heard on net­work tele­vi­sion. I think…