A.Word.A.Day --inveigh

A.Word.A.Day

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Oct 8, 2012

This week's theme
Miscellaneous words

This week's words
inveigh
apostle
mense
bunbury
feint

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A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

What makes a good usage example for a word? It's not one single attribute. We try to find examples that, besides illustrating a word clearly, are topical, short, funny, and informative, though it's not always feasible to have it all. When it's an unusual word, we're lucky to find more than a couple of recent examples of its use.

Readers sometimes ask if they can read the whole story mentioned in the usage example. It's not always possible as the quoted article may not be freely available on the web.

This week's five words have interesting usage examples and include links to their complete texts. These examples are from several fields -- technology, religion, politics, literature, zoology, and more -- but they are all worth reading and provide food for thought.

inveigh

PRONUNCIATION:

(in-VAY)

MEANING:

verb intr.: To complain or protest with great hostility.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin invehi (to attack with words), from invehere (to carry in). Ultimately from the Indo-European root wegh- (to go or to transport in a vehicle) that also gave us deviate, way, weight, wagon, vogue, vehicle, vector, envoy, and trivial. Earliest documented use: 1486.

USAGE:

"The rabbi inveighed against anyone possessing the popular smartphone. 'A religious person who owns this impure device is an abomination and a disgusting, vile villain,' he said."
Jeremy Sharon; Rabbi Strikes Against iPhone; The Jerusalem Post (Israel); Sep 14, 2012.

See more usage examples of inveigh in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Who knows what Columbus would have discovered if America hadn't got in the way. -Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)

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