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piebald: msg#00008culture.language.word-of-the-day
**************************************************************** Enjoy a 14-day free preview of our growing collection of indispensable references at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged! http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged_sub.pl?refr=U_wod **************************************************************** The Word of the Day for October 9 is: piebald \ PYE-bawld \ adjective *1 : composed of incongruous parts 2 : of different colors; especially : spotted or blotched with black and white Example sentence: Lee's self-proclaimed "experimental novel" was a piebald accumulation of random stories woven together with the thinnest of narrative threads. Did you know? To many people, the species _Pica pica_ is nothing but a pest -- and a pest those noisy black-and-white birds, better known as magpies, may be. But the Latin root "pica" that was adopted for their name isn't a linguistic nuisance; it played an important role in the development of "piebald." The "pie" of "piebald" ("pie" is another name for a magpie) derives from "pica," Latin for "magpie," and "bald" has the meaning "marked with white." Knowing those two facts surely makes the origin of "piebald" black-and-white (so to speak). *Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence. |
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