Category: Word of the Day – S

Word of the Day: STIRIOUS

ETYMOLOGY
from stiria (an icicle) + -ous

EXAMPLE
“…The ground of this opinion might be, first the conclusions of some men from experience, for as much as Crystall is found sometimes in rockes, and in some places not much unlike the stirious or stillicidious dependencies of Ice; which notwithstanding may happen either in places which havee been forsaken or left bare by the earth, or may be petrifications, or Minerall indurations, like other gemmes proceeding from percolations of the earth disposed unto such concretions…”

From: Pseudodoxia Epidemica,
or, Enquiries into very many received tenents and commonly presumed truths
By Thomas Browne

Word of the Day: SCRIBACIOUS

ETYMOLOGY
from Latin scrībĕre (to write) + -acious

EXAMPLE
“…We have some Letters of Popes, (though not many; for Popes were then not very scribacious, or not so pragmatical; whence to supply that defect, lest Popes should seem not able to write, or to have slept almost 400 years, they have forged divers for them, and those so wise ones, that we who love the memory of those good Popes, disdain to acknowledge them Authours of such idle stuff; we have yet some Letters)…”

From: A Treatise of the Pope’s Supremacy:
to which is added a Discourse Concerning the Unity of the Church
– Isaac Barrow, a1677

Word of the Day: STRADDLE-BUG

ETYMOLOGY
from straddle (with the legs astride)

EXAMPLE
“…If he even seen a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road. …”

From: The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,
By S. L. Clemens (Mark Twain), 1867