persiflage

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The Word of the Day for January 29 is:

persiflage   \PER-suh-flahzh\   noun 
     : frivolous bantering talk : light raillery 

Example sentence: 
     When the cooking segment ran short, Greta and her cohost turned to 
persiflage to fill up the time left until the commercial break. 

Did you know? 
     Unwanted persiflage on television might provoke an impatient audience to 
hiss or boo, but from an etymological standpoint, no other reaction could be 
more appropriate. English speakers picked up "persiflage" from French in the 
18th century. Its ancestor is the French verb "persifler," which means "to 
banter," and which was formed from the prefix "per-," meaning "thoroughly," 
plus "siffler," meaning "to whistle, hiss, or boo." "Siffler" in turn derived 
from the Latin verb "sibilare," meaning "to whistle or hiss." By the way, 
"sibilare" is also the source of "sibilant," a word linguists use to describe 
sounds like "s" or the sound "sh" in "sash." That Latin root also underlies the 
verb "sibilate," meaning "to hiss" or "to pronounce with or utter an initial 
sibilant."