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simpatico: msg#00021

culture.language.word-of-the-day

Subject: simpatico

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The Word of the Day for September 22 is:

simpatico \sim-PAH-tih-koh\ adjective
1 : agreeable, likeable
*2 : being on the same wavelength : congenial, sympathetic

Example sentence:
As business partners, Jake and Mark haven't always been simpatico, but
they complement each other's talents and compensate for each other's faults.

Did you know?
"Simpatico," which ultimately derives from the Latin noun "sympathia,"
meaning "sympathy," was borrowed into English from both Italian and Spanish. In
those languages, the word has been chiefly used to describe people who are
well-liked or easy to get along with; early uses of the word in English
reflected this, as in Henry James's 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady, in which
a character says of another's dying cousin, "Ah, he was so simpatico. I'm
awfully sorry for you." In recent years, however, the word's meaning has
shifted. Now we see it used to describe the relationship between people who get
along well or work well together.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.







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