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Aug 1, 2022
This week’s theme
Verbs

This week’s words
obtrude
mundify
discerp
elute
micrify

omnishambles
Illustration: Karen Folsom #kgfolsart

Previous week’s theme
Words derived after names
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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

Eat, pray, love
Eat, shoot and leave

What do you see above? Sure, lots of eating going on there, but we are not telling you to eat or what to eat or what to do before/after eating. We’re not even telling you to read or what to read.

Rather we are giving examples of verbs. Verbs are the words that keep the world going. Imagine how you’d eat, drink, and be merry, if there were no verbs!

This week we’ll see five unusual verbs, actions some of which you probably don’t do every day, and others, you hopefully do.

obtrude

PRONUNCIATION:
(uhb/ob-TROOD)

MEANING:
verb tr.: To impose one’s ideas, opinions, etc.
verb intr.: To thrust forward or to intrude.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin obtrudere (to thrust at), from ob- (against) + trudere (to push). Ultimately from the Indo-European root treud- (to squeeze), which also gave us extrude, intrude, threat, thrust, and abstruse. Earliest documented use: 1575.

USAGE:
“I shall allow you neither to entangle yourself in an engagement, nor to embarrass my affianced wife by obtruding yourself upon her.”
Georgette Heyer; Bath Tangle; William Heinemann; 1955.

“Part of a pale-blue window obtrudes. But nothing disrupts the composition’s essential harmony.”
Peter Schjeldahl; Going Flat Out; The New Yorker; May 16, 2022.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. -Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones), schoolteacher, dressmaker, organizer, and activist (1 Aug 1837-1930)

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