Word of the Week Wednesday: bifurcate

This Wednesday’s Word of the Week is: bifurcate.

To bifurcate is to split in two.  Specifically to fork into two parts.

What I like about this word is that it’s an overly fancy word for something simple, that could be used to describe a violent action.

It’s the same reason I’ve always liked the word defenestrate: to throw (a person or thing) out a window.

Related articles

• T- vs Y- shaped coronary bifurcations (cardiophile.org)
• Note 296 – The words bifurcate, trifurcate and quadfurcate (mywritingnotebook.com)

District 66 Spring Conference Recap

This past weekend, April 21st and 22nd was our District 66 Spring Conference.

It was held in Staunton, VA, a three and a half hour drive from where I live, but well worth the trip.

We had two incredible guest speakers:

• Ed Sykes who gave an incredible presentation about using Social Media and Blogging effectively.
• Ed Tate, 2000 World Champion of Public Speaking who talked to us about mindset shifts and held a Train the Trainer session to prepare us all to conduct our officer training this coming year.

In addition to these and many other great educational sessions, we also had our District Table Topics and International Speech contests.  Fun Fact: It turns out the winner of our Table Topics contest is a haberdasher.

It was a great time and I was happy to have the opportunity to meet up again with Toastmasters from across the District.  Definitely worth the drive (especially since I won the 50/50 raffle).

 

Word of the Week Wednesday: pococurante

This Wednesday’s Word of the Week is: pococurante.

Pococurante is a word from the Italian (obviously) meaning careless or indifferent or a person who is.

The word comes from poco- meaning little and cure meaning care.

The three c’s in a row give it a running rhythm to my ear which I find quite nice.

However, it also feels like an inordinately ornate and twee word to mean the lack of caring.

Maybe that just gives it the right touch of irony, though, like calling a big guy “tiny”.

Related articles

• 130. pococurante (muirnin.wordpress.com)

Word of the Week Wednesday: rutilant

This Wednesday’s Word of the Week is: rutilant.

Rutilant means glowing with a ruddy or golden light.

I find this word intriguing because the Latin root means reddish, which makes sense for a ruddy glow, but I’m not sure where the golden part comes from.

It also reminds me of the word, ruminant, which could be further away in meaning.

Related articles

• Are you feeling sparkly? (lcsmithwrites.wordpress.com)
• Rutilated Quartz (blissreturned.wordpress.com)
• Rutilant Presence (haiku365.wordpress.com)

Word of the Week Wednesday: egregious

This Wednesday’s Word of the Week is: egregious.

Egregious means notable our outstanding in a bad way.

Often, the word is used to simply mean, really bad.  This misses what I consider one of the more interesting aspects of the word’s meaning.

There are many perfectly good words for “really bad” (heinous for instance).

What stands out with this word is that it’s more than just bad, but so bad as to be noteworthy.

It comes from the Latin e- meaning out of or away from and grege from grex meaning flock or herd.  It originally just meant outstanding (from the hoi polloi) with the negative meaning being ironic.  Irony won out and it is now almost never used positively.