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Oct 1, 2021
This week’s theme
Hand to mouth

This week’s words
handmaiden
snoutfair
sticky-fingered
gobsmacked
hardfisted

hardfisted
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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

hardfisted

PRONUNCIATION:
(HARD-fis-tid)

MEANING:
adjective:
1. Stingy.
2. Tough, aggressive, or ruthless.
3. Having hands made rough by labor: hardhanded.

ETYMOLOGY:
From hard + fisted, from Old English fyst (fist). Earliest documented use: 1612.

USAGE:
“Callovan inherited his wealth from his hard-fisted old father.”
Francis Clement Kelley; The City and the World and Other Stories; Extension Press; 1913.

“The plains were crawling with rough, hardfisted men, who had been weaned on skinned knuckles and a swift kick to the balls.”
Matt Braun; Cimarron Jordan; Pocket Books; 1975.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs. -Daniel J Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1 Oct 1914-2004)

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