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Aug 31, 2012
This week's theme
Usage examples that are food for thought

This week's words
salutary
lucriferous
pugilist
strop
concomitant

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

concomitant

PRONUNCIATION:
(kuhn-KOM-i-tuhnt)

MEANING:
adjective: Occurring concurrently, especially in an incidental way.
noun: Something that occurs concurrently.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin (concomitari, to accompany), com- (with) + comitari (to accompany), from comes (companion). Earliest documented use: 1608.

USAGE:
"A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition."
Charles Caleb Colton; Lacon: or Many Things in Few Words; Longmans; 1837.

"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
Novelist and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968).

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. -Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

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