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placate: msg#00005culture.language.word-of-the-day
**************************************************************** Looking online for all those new words you've been hearing about? Try a 14-day free trial to Merriam-Webster Collegiate.com today! http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/collegiate_sub.pl?refr=C_wod **************************************************************** The Word of the Day for February 6 is: placate \PLAY-kayt\ verb : to soothe or mollify especially by concessions : appease Example sentence: After his baseball crashed through his neighbor's window, Jared tried to placate the angry man by offering to replace the window with his own money. Did you know? The earliest documented uses of "placate" in English date from the late 17th century. The word is derived from the Latin "placatus," the past participle of "placare," and even after more than 300 years in English it still carries the basic meaning of its Latin ancestor: "to soothe" or "to appease." Other "placare" descendants in English are "implacable" (meaning "not easily soothed or satisfied") and "placation" ("the act of soothing or appeasing"). Even "please" itself, derived from the Latin "placere" ("to please"), is a distant relative of "placate." |
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