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Dec 18, 2013
This week's theme
Verbs

This week's words
descant
hebetate
blandish
importune
colligate

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

blandish

PRONUNCIATION:
(BLAN-dish)

MEANING:
verb intr.: To coax with flattery.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin blandiri (to flatter). Ultimately from the Indo-European root mel- (soft), which also gave us bland, melt, smelt, malt, mild, mulch, mollify, mollusk, emollient, enamel, smalto, and schmaltz. Earliest documented use: 1305.

USAGE:
"In his first speech in the Parliament, Mussolini insulted and blandished the legislature by turns."
Thomas Bokenkotter; Church and Revolution; Doubleday; 1998.

See more usage examples of blandish in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason. -Thomas Carlyle, historian and essayist (1795-1881)

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