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abnegate: msg#00006

culture.language.word-of-the-day

Subject: abnegate

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It's May! Or is it "might"? Settle the dispute with our
Concise Dictionary of English Usage.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/book.pl?conusg.htm&6
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The Word of the Day for May 7 is:

abnegate \AB-nih-gayt\ verb
1 : deny, renounce
*2 : surrender, relinquish

Example sentence:
Sylvia chose to abnegate the privileges of her wealthy
upbringing, seeking instead a simple life helping those less
fortunate than herself.

Did you know?
There's no denying that the Latin root "negare" has given
English some useful verbs. That verb, which means "to deny," was
the ultimate source of the noun "abnegation," a synonym
of "denial" that began appearing in English manuscripts in the
14th century. By the 17th century, people had concluded that if
there was a noun "abnegation," there ought to be a related
verb "abnegate," and so they created one by a process
called "back-formation" (that's the process of trimming a suffix
or prefix off a long word to make a shorter one). But "abnegate"
and "abnegation" are not the only English offspring of "negare."
That root is also an ancestor of other nay-saying terms such
as "deny," "negate," and "renegade."





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