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Discuss Email this Feedback RSS/XML Permalink A.Word.A.Day--hardscrabble This week's theme: red-herring words. hardscrabble (HARD-skrab-uhl) adjective 1. Yielding little for much effort. 2. Relating to a place that provides for bare subsistence. [From English hard + Dutch schrabbelen (to scrape). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sker- (to cut) that's also the source of words such as skirt, sharp, scrape, screw, shard, shears, carnage, curt, and carnivorous.] Today's word in Visual Thesaurus. -Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) "How did young Mildred, a homely, chubby, fatherless kid, reared on a hardscrabble Iowa farm during the Great Depression manage to work up the genius to relish every minute of her life?" Elizabeth Gilbert; The Home Place; The New York Times; Jul 1, 2007. X-Bonus Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from that of their social environment. -Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

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