Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

To eschew something is to avoid it, especially because you do not think it is right, proper, or practical.

// Their teacher was known as a Luddite because he eschewed the use of smartphones and tablets in the classroom.

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“Scheduled work shifts [at Burning Man] were delayed and continually rearranged, causing confusion among campers as to how and when to contribute.... While some of us found ways to help, others took it as an opportunity to eschew their responsibilities. However, those of us who showed up united, and handled business, did so with aplomb...” — Morena Duwe, The Los Angeles Times, 9 Sept. 2024

Something to chew on: there’s no etymological relationship between the verbs chew and eschew. While the former comes from the Old English word cēowan, eschew comes instead from the Anglo-French verb eschiver and shares roots with the Old High German verb sciuhen, meaning “to frighten off.” In his famous dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson characterized eschew as “almost obsolete.” History has proven that the great lexicographer was wrong on that call, however. Today, following a boom in the word’s usage during the 19th and 20th centuries, English speakers and writers use eschew when something is avoided less for temperamental reasons than for moral or practical ones, even if misguidedly so, as when Barry Lopez wrote in his 2019 book Horizon of ill-fated Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, “with an attitude of cultural superiority, eschewing sled dogs for Manchurian ponies....”

Someone described as complaisant is willing or eager to please other people, or is easily convinced to do what other people want.

// Derek was a complaisant boy, always happy to oblige whenever his mother or father asked him to run an errand.

// She was too complaisant to say no to her sister's demands.

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“Last month Ferrari lofted its banners over a resort near the southern port of Cagliari and invited journalists to test-drive the new Ferrari Roma Spider, taking advantage of the excellent tarmac, ideal weather and complaisant authorities.” — Dan Neil, The Wall Street Journal, 5 Oct. 2023

Complaisant and complacent are often confused, and for good reason. Not only do the words look and sound alike, but they also both come from Latin verb complacēre, meaning “to please greatly.” (The placēre in complacēre is an ancestor of the English word please). Complacent is used disapprovingly to describe someone who is self-satisfied or unconcerned with whatever is going on, but it also shares with complaisant the sense of “inclined to please or oblige.” This sense of complacent is an old one, but that hasn’t kept language critics from labeling its use as an error—and on the whole, modern writers do prefer complaisant for this meaning. Whether you complaisantly oblige, well, that’s up to you.

A scintilla is a very small amount of something. Scintilla is usually used in negative statements, as in “not even/nary a scintilla.”

// There wasn’t even a scintilla of evidence to support their story.

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“… there was one part of his Irish childhood that would follow [Oscar] Wilde across the sea to England. A tiny part of his childhood, admittedly. The merest scintilla of his youth.” — Alexander Poots, The Strangers’ House: Writing Northern Ireland, 2023

Wonder what scintillas (or scintillae) are? It may help spark your memory to look up above the world so high at the tiny (to our eyes) stars twinkling like diamonds in the sky. Scintilla comes directly from Latin, where it refers to a spark—that is, a bright flash such as you might see from a burning ember (the noun scintilla is related to the verb scintillare, which means “to sparkle” and is responsible for the English verb scintillate meaning “to sparkle or gleam”). In the 17th century, English carried over this “glittering particle” sense, which is still in use today, as when Scottish writer Rudi Zygadlo wrote of the Gulf of Mexico “fizzing with scintillas underneath the rising sun.” In the same century, people also began using scintilla figuratively for a hint or trace of something that barely suggests its presence. Today this sense is much more common, and especially found in negative statements, such as “We have not a scintilla of doubt that you are now humming ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’”

Someone described as frugal is careful about spending money or using things unnecessarily. Frugal can also describe something that is simple and plain in a way that reflects such carefulness with money and resources.

// By being frugal and limiting unnecessary purchases, the family is able to stretch its monthly budget.

// Sometimes a frugal meal of bread, cheese, and grapes can be just as satisfying as a lavish feast.

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“‘I would take anything that I had and put it into a pan and just fry it up, and then eat it with a fork out of the pan, because it would also cut down on the minimum amount of dishes for me to have to clean,’ he [Kevin Bacon] recalls of some of his early egg-onion-leftover-pasta concoctions. And though his frugal days are behind him, the star still prefers cooking over fancy restaurant meals most of the time.” — Clarissa Cruz, People, 9 Nov. 2023

Folks who are frugal tend to frown on the frivolous frittering away of the fruits of their labor, so it may surprise you to learn that frugal comes from the Latin word frūx, which means, among other things, “fruit.” Perhaps because of fruit’s financial value, from frūx followed frūgī, an adjective meaning “deserving, sober, or thrifty,” which finagled its way into Late Latin in the form of frūgālis (“not given to excess; temperate, sober, simple”), then Middle French, and finally English, as the familiar frugal. Today, frugal is used to describe things that reflect a fastidious dedication to foregoing the fancy, as in “he insists on a frugal diet of fungi and fava beans.” Frugal can also describe a person, usually with respect to money, but one can be frugal with other things, too, such as words that start with the letter f, though we certainly haven’t been in this paragraph.

To obfuscate something is to make it more difficult to understand. Obfuscate can also mean “to be evasive, unclear, or confusing.” 

// The revised wording of the rule obfuscates its meaning.

// They allege that the company’s representative lied and obfuscated when answering questions about the report.

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“‘I firmly believe that cyber-insecurity is fundamentally a policy problem,’ says Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the security firm Emsisoft. ‘We need standardized and uniform disclosure and reporting laws, prescribed language for those disclosures and reports, regulation and licensing of negotiators. Far too much happens in the shadows or is obfuscated by weasel words. It’s counterproductive and helps only the cybercriminals.’” — Lily Hay Newman, WIRED, 5 Dec. 2023

“Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.” So begins the classic 1960s Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence,” which was written by Paul Simon with a seemingly oxymoronic title that has obfuscated—that is, confused—ten thousand people, maybe more (probably a lot more) in the decades since. It confuses us too, but we’re not above being oxymoronic ourselves when we say that darkness, our old friend, shines a helpful light on the meaning of the word obfuscate. When obfuscate first came into use in the early 16th century, it was with the meaning “to throw into shadow.” This makes sense, since the word comes from the Latin obfuscāre (“to obscure or darken”) which itself comes in part from fuscus (“dark-colored”). The word was used for both figurative and literal darkening before developing the even more figurative senses of “to make more difficult to understand,” “to be evasive or unclear,” and “to confuse,” which in modern use are now more common.

Victuals is a word with an old-fashioned feel that refers to food, and sometimes to both food and drink.

// Rachel’s grandparents’ larder was full of canned tomatoes and peaches, jars of pickled beans, jugs of dandelion wine, and other time-honored victuals.

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“May in Atlanta brings refreshing cocktails, meals on the patio and Cinco de Mayo festivities. The holiday, which celebrates the Mexican army’s victory over France at the 1862 Battle of Puebla, offers the perfect occasion to appreciate Mexican-American culture and all the great victuals associated with it.” — Olivia Wakim, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 22 Apr. 2024

In the introduction to her 2016 cookbook Victuals, writer Ronni Lundy remarks on the (to some) unusual divergence between how her book’s title is spelled and how it is pronounced: “Say it the way my people have for centuries: vidls. ... Maybe you thought saying it that way was wrong. But look up that word in your dictionary. It turns out my people, the people of the southern Appalachian Mountains, have been right about victuals all along.” Indeed, they have! Victuals refers to supplies of usually prepared foods (rather than raw ingredients) and comes from the Late Latin word victualia meaning “provisions,” and ultimately from Latin vivere, “to live.” It went through French before it came into English, and the pronunciation VIT-ulz was presumably established based on the French spelling vitaille before the spelling was changed to better reflect the Latin root of the word. Victuals would be spelled “vittles” if its pronunciation dictated its form, and vittles is in fact given in our dictionaries as a variant of victuals, though the spelling is used mostly playfully to evoke the supposed language of cowboys as depicted in movies, etc.

A guttural sound—such as speech, laughter, or a grunt—is formed or pronounced in the throat.

// Her friends always found her deep, guttural laugh to be highly contagious.

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“Mantled howler monkeys are one of the largest primates in Mexico and Central America, measuring around 25 inches on average. Covered in thick black fur, they are known for their low, guttural calls.” — Manuela Andreoni, The New York Times, 22 May 2024

Get your mind out of the gutter. Despite appearances, guttural is not related to the English word gutter; that word comes ultimately from the Latin verb gutta, meaning “drop,” while guttural has a different Latin root: the noun guttur, meaning “throat.” Since the late 1500s guttural has been used to describe sounds that are formed or pronounced in the throat, from cries and sobs to howls and grunts. A second sense, describing sounds or utterances which strike the listener as harsh or disagreeable (as in “the guttural roar of a motorcycle engine disturbed the afternoon’s quiet”) followed. A new sense appears to be developing as well, describing things that are instinctively or deeply felt irrespective of grunts or noises from the throat, as in “a guttural response/reaction,” but this sense has yet to meet the criteria for inclusion in our dictionary.

An eddy is a current of water or air running contrary to the main current, especially as a whirlpool. In figurative use, eddy may also refer to a contrary or circular current of thought or policy.

// The strong gusts whipped up eddies of fallen leaves.

// They were caught up in the eddies of chaos.

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"These adventures were avenues to experience nature, the way a river current bends around rocks to form strings of rapids and eddies, the way snow blankets the land in a brisk silence. I made note of these observations. As I explored the landscape, I also began to explore its stories." — Teow Lim Goh, LitHub.com, 1 Nov. 2022

"He walked by the stream, far from the houses, and in the light and warmth of the sun fell asleep on the bank. When he awoke and was afoot again, he lingered there yet a little longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea." This use of eddy (from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens) reflects a sense that has been swirling around English for centuries; the earliest documented uses of eddy to refer to water currents goes back to the 1400s. Etymologists trace the word to the Scottish dialect term ydy, which had the same basic meaning as our modern term. The verb form of eddy meaning "to move in or cause to move in an eddy or in the manner of an eddy" (as in "the waves eddied against the pier") appeared a few centuries after the noun.

To chastise someone is to criticize them harshly for doing something wrong.

// The waiter was chastised for forgetting the customer’s order.

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“… what I’m saying is that we must acknowledge that hypocrisy exists all around us and not jump to chastise and blame someone every time we encounter an example of it. If we rush to judge and shame someone each time we see hypocrisy, we risk hindering progress in solving some of our biggest problems.” — Stephanie Dillon, Rolling Stone, 5 Apr. 2024

If you want to understand the meaning of chastise (which comes from the Anglo-French verb castier, meaning “to discipline”), you could do worse than to turn to popular music. Pop, rap, jazz, rock, country—there’s not a single genre that isn’t full of songs penned from the point of view of jilted and/or cheated lovers chastising—that is, harshly criticizing—the one who did them wrong. Nearly every song on Beyoncé’s 2016 album Lemonade, for example, is a master class in chastisement (chastisement being, of course, the noun form of chastise), featuring such lyrics as “What a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you” and “Ten times out of nine, I know you’re lying.” Chastise itself pops up in lyrics occasionally, too, as sung by artists including Guns N’ Roses (“So don’t chastise me or think I mean you harm”), Dr. Dre (“Fool, you better recognize / Death Row came to chastise”), and Janet Jackson (“Control and chastise / An instrument of punishment / Like a whip”). Jackson’s use is notable in particular for representing the word’s oldest sense, less common but still in use, of “to inflict punishment on (as with a whip).”

Someone or something described as lenient is not harsh, severe, or strict. In other words, they allow a lot of freedom and leeway, and do not punish or correct in a strong way.

// The teacher was lenient in her grading after the holiday break.

// Some concerned citizens felt the punishment was too lenient.

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“In the adult section of the library, the patrons arrived generally by themselves. … If they did something as human as nodding off, they would be kicked out immediately. … The children’s section was a little more lenient when it came to rules. A child would be splayed on the floor staring at the ceiling with their mittens and boots lying around them as though they were pieces of them that had broken off. There were children playing Battleship. There would be a child sitting in a chair shaped like a giant hand, reading up on the increasingly absurdly horrific circumstances of orphans while eating a box of Goldfish crackers.” — Heather O’Neill, “Lite-Brite Times Square,” Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood, 2022

If you’ve ever had a peaceful, easy feeling—perhaps brought on by someone who you know won’t let you down—then you’ll have no problem understanding the earliest meaning of lenient. When it entered English in the mid-1600s, lenient described something soothing—such as a medication—that relieved pain or stress, or otherwise enabled someone to take it easy. For a brief window of time it was even used as a noun, referring to any of various ointments and balms that help heal wounds in the long run. Lenient comes from the Latin verb lenire, meaning “to soften or soothe,” which in turn comes from the adjective lenis, meaning “soft or mild.” The “soothing or easing” sense of lenient is still in use today, but English speakers are more likely to apply it to someone who is lax with the rules (as in “a lenient professor”), who doesn’t mind when someone acts like a certain kind of fool or takes it to the limit one more time.