A.Word.A.Day --chicane

A.Word.A.Day

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Mar 7, 2016

This week’s theme
Unfamiliar cousins of everyday words

This week’s words
chicane
derogate
ludic
altercate
complot

A bike chicane in Ebisu, Japan

Photo: ykanazawa1999

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

You see someone regularly in a certain setting, say a gym, and then you meet them elsewhere, and it takes a moment to realize that it’s the same person in a different outfit. It’s the same with this week’s words. You are likely familiar with them, except they appear in a different form.

chicane

PRONUNCIATION:

(shi-KAYN)

MEANING:

verb tr.: To trick or deceive.
noun: 1. Deception. 2. An artificial narrowing or a turn added to a road to slow traffic down.

ETYMOLOGY:

From French chicaner (to quibble). Earliest documented use: 1672.

USAGE:

“I was totally bamboozled; I was chicaned.”
David James Duncan; The River Why; Sierra Club Books; 1983.

“He rounded the chicane to see another car slowing down.”
Anthony Hulse; The Club; Lulu; 2014.

See more usage examples of chicane in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weeds. -Luther Burbank, horticulturist (7 Mar 1849-1926)

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