Word of the Day

[pegasus]

baldachin / (BAL-duh-kin, BOL-) Also, baldacchino, baldachino (bal-duh-KEE-noh) / noun:
1. A rich embroidered fabric of silk and gold.
2. A canopy.
USAGE:
"A rabbi married the couple a few weeks later, under a baldachin made of four brooms and an old blanket."
--Henryk M. Broder; "Holocaust Survivor Becomes YouTube Star;" Der Spiegel (Germany), 12 Aug 2010.
ETYMOLOGY:
English baldachin is derived from Italian baldacchino which is from Baldacco, the Italian name for Baghdad. The city was once known for this fabric and earlier canopies were made of it. Earliest documented use: 1598.

frondescence\ fron-DES-uhns \ , noun;
1. Leafage; foliage. 2. The process or period of putting forth leaves, as a tree, plant, or the like.
QUOTES:
1. What we found were three hundred pristine, mostly level acres with a forty-five-acre pond, completely undeveloped, covered with exquisite wildflowers and frondescence .
-- Paul Newman, In Pursuit of the Common Good
2. I now become aware of the sound of rumbling water, emanating from somewhere inside the rain forest next to my tropical rest stop. I approach the wet and abundant frondescence of the forest.
-- Richard Wyatt, Fathers of Myth
ORIGIN:
Frondescence - from the Latin root frondçre meaning “to have leaves.” It is clearly related to frond meaning “leaves.”

salient \SAIL-yunt\, adjective
1: jutting forward beyond a line
2: standing out conspicuously : prominent; especially : of notable significance
USAGE:
1. The speech was filled with so much twisted rhetoric that it was hard to identify any salient points.
2. "My point is that it might be a mistake to suppose that the director of '10,000 B.C.' -- to mention only the most salient example -- should be taken as a reliable guide to history."
-- From a review by A.O.Scott in The New York Times, 28 Oct 2011.
DID YOU KNOW?
Salient first popped up in English in the mid-17th century, and in its earliest English uses meant "moving by leaps or springs" (as in "a salient cheetah") or "spouting forth" (as in "a salient fountain"). Those senses aren't too much of a jump from the word's parent, the Latin verb salire, which means "to leap." Salire has leaped into many English words; it's also an ancestor of "somersault" and "sally," as well as "Salientia," the name for an order of amphibians that includes frogs, toads, and other notable jumpers. Today, "salient" is usually used to describe things that are physically prominent (such as a salient nose) or that stand out figuratively (such as the salient features of a painting).

[pegasus]

Namaste'

I honor the place in you'
in which the entire universe dwells.
I honor the place in you
which is of love, of truth,
of light, and of peace.
When you are in that place in you
and I am in that place in me,
we are one.

[pegasus]

per contra (per-KAHN-truh) adverb
DEFINITION
1 a : on the contrary b : by way of contrast
2 : as an offset
EXAMPLES
I don't think this is a good plan at all; per contra, I think it's likely to cause a serious problem.
DID YOU KNOW?
Luca Pacioli knew a thing or two about keeping the records straight. He was a Franciscan friar and mathematician who lived during the Italian Renaissance and he is called the "father of accounting" because he was the first to publish a detailed description of bookkeeping practices that are still used today. Among his other counsel, Pacioli advised merchants to keep an accurate ledger with debits entered on the left side and credits on the right. The word "per contra" calls to mind this time-honored practice of balancing items on one side of a ledger against those on the other. The term comes from Italian, and it translates literally as "by the opposite side (of the ledger)."

FINALE (fə-ˈna-lç, fi-ˈnä) noun
DEFINITION:
1. the closing section of a musical composition
SYN: coda
2. the concluding part of any performance
SYN: close, closing curtain, finis
3. the temporal end; the concluding time
SYN: close, conclusion, finis, finish, last, stopping point
EXAMPLE:
1. Tchaikovsky's1812 Overture ends with a booming finale.
2. If you decide to leave the theater early to beat traffic, you’ll miss the finale.
3. The team enters its preseason finale, Thursday night at New England, with two offensive touchdowns, an unsettling bottom line.

CHAMBRAY (SHAM-brey) noun
DEFINITION:
: a fine cloth of cotton, silk, or linen, commonly of plain weave with a colored warp and white weft.
EXAMPLE:
On the way out the door, I noticed a video of Kamprad, in a chambray shirt and gold chain, playing on a nearby screen.
-- Lauren Collins, "House Perfect," The New Yorker , Oct. 3, 2008
ORIGIN:
Chambray is an Americanism that arose in the early 1800s. It's a variant of the word cambric , which is named for the city in Northern France, Cambrai via the Dutch word Kameryk .


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