supercilious

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The Word of the Day for December 8 is: 

supercilious   \soo-per-SILL-ee-us\   adjective
          : coolly and patronizingly haughty 

Example sentence:
          Lucinda's beauty attracted many suitors, but her supercilious manner 
eventually drove them all away.

Did you know?
     Arrogant and disdainful types tend to raise an eyebrow at anything they 
consider beneath them. The original supercilious crowd must have shown that 
raised-eyebrow look often, because the adjective "supercilious" derives from 
"supercilium," Latin for "eyebrow." (We plucked our adjective and its meaning 
from the Latin adjective "superciliosus.") "Supercilious" has been used to 
describe the censoriously overbearing since the late 1600s, but there was a 
time in the 1700s when it was also used as a synonym of another "supercilium" 
descendent, "superciliary" ("of, relating to, or adjoining the eyebrow"). 
Although the eyebrow sense of "supercilious" is now obsolete, it does help 
explain what ornithologist John Latham meant in 1782 when he described a 
"Supercilious K[ingfisher]" with a narrow orange stripe over its eyes.





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