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aborning: msg#00005culture.language.word-of-the-day
**************************************************************** Spring fever? Watch your vocabulary grow by trying a free 14-day subscription to Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com! http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged_sub.pl?refr=U_wod **************************************************************** The Word of the Day for April 6 is: aborning \uh-BOR-ning\ adverb : while being born or produced Example sentence: "Similar proposals in 1999 and 2001 died aborning in Congress, but in May the Judiciary Committee passed this bill on to the Senate floor...." (_Editor & Publisher_, July 14, 2003) Did you know? "Aborning" is a native of U.S. soil; its arrival is marked in the early 20th century dialect of the rural South, and it quickly found its way to the crowded cities and towns of the industrial north. (We don't know exactly when it was conceived, but it came to the attention of the editors at Merriam-Webster in 1916.) "Aborning" combines the prefix "a-," meaning "in the process of," and "borning," a dialectal word meaning "birth." "Borning" itself is simply the gerund, or noun form, of the verb "born," a dialectal term that was used by, among others, William Faulkner: "The talk... went here and there about the town, dying and borning again like a wind or a fire." (_Light in August_, 1932) |
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