This week’s theme
Creative usage examples

This week’s words
gleek
gowpen
fractal
glabella
diachrony

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(GAU-puhn)

MEANING:

noun: Two hands cupped together.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old Norse gaupn (cupped hands). Earliest documented use: 1325.

USAGE:

“When a human body
is drained of its broths and filled
again with formaldehyde and salts,
or unguents and aromatic oils, and pranked
up in its holiday best and laid out
in a satin-lined airtight stainless steel
coffin and stowed in a leakproof concrete vault --
I will know that if no fellow-creatures
can pry their way in to do the underdigging
and jiggling and earthing over and mating
and egg laying and birthing forth,
then the most that can come to pass
will be centuries-long whithering
down to a gowpen of dead dust, and not ever
the crawling of new life out of the old,
which is what we have for eternity on earth.”
Galway Kinnell; The Quick and The Dead; The New Yorker; Dec 25, 2000.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: