Showing posts with label The Word of the Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Word of the Day. Show all posts

Monday, August 4, 2008

The Word of the Day

I recently signed up for The Word of the Day daily emails from Dictionary.com.

One word I received is a bit curious:

pusillanimous \pyoo-suh-LAN-uh-muhs\, adjective:

Lacking in courage and resolution; contemptibly fearful; cowardly.

Evil, unspeakable evil, rose in our midst, and we as a people were too weak, too indecisive, too pusillanimous to deal with it.-- Kevin Myers, "An Irishman's Diary", Irish Times, October 20, 1999

Under the hypnosis of war hysteria, with a pusillanimous Congress rubber-stamping every whim of the White House, we passed the withholding tax.-- Vivien Kellems, Toil, Taxes and Trouble

You are now anxious to form excuses to yourself for a conduct so pusillanimous.-- Ann Radcliffe, The Italian

Pusillanimous comes from Late Latin pusillanimis, from Latin pusillus, "very small, tiny, puny" + animus, "soul, mind."

I think we all use the shorter, 5 letter version of pusillanimous more often, don’t cha???

Happy Monday.

- The Mountain Cat