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Feb 12, 2024
This week’s themeWords coined after animals This week’s words reptilian eager beaver testudinal weasel big fish 
Illustration: Anu Garg + AI Previous week’s theme Words derived from food 
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu GargDarwin once said, “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” Living beings lie on a continuum, from the single-celled amoeba to us humans, H. Sapiens, supposedly wise. We, sapient ones, have judged the animals. Hares are supposedly harebrained. Stormy petrels supposedly bring trouble. (Well, Stormy does bring trouble, at least to one person who totally deserves it.) Such characterizations are often unfair to the poor animal. Sometimes the coined word is apt though, as in the case of chameleonic because chameleons do change color based on their surroundings. This week we’ll look at five words that are coined after animals. Imagine if the tables were turned: if animals could coin terms based on human behavior, what might they create? Share your inventive words, complete with definitions and usage examples below or email us at words@wordsmith.org. As always, include your location (city, state). reptilian
PRONUNCIATION:
(rep-TIL-ee-uhn, -TIL-yuhn)
MEANING:
adjective: 1. Contemptible. 2. Treacherous. 3. Like a reptile. ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin reptile, from repere (to creep). Earliest documented use: 1835.
USAGE:
“Whoever this individual was, he was an unmitigated villain -- a reptilian villain!” Theodore Dreiser; An American Tragedy; Boni & Liveright; 1925. See more usage examples of reptilian in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to
do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to
me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent
and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the
express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of
caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. -Charles Darwin,
naturalist and author (12 Feb 1809-1882) [Ichneumonidae: The family of
parasitic wasps that deposit eggs inside or on top of the larvae of other
insects. Once hatched, the ichneumonid larva slowly eats its host alive
from inside out.]
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