A.Word.A.Day --parturition

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Oct 14, 2024

This week’s theme
Usage examples that are food for thought

This week’s words
parturition
avarice
panacea

Celebrating the Birth, 1664

Art: Jan Steen

Previous week’s theme
Eponymic adjectives

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

George Bernard Shaw once quipped, “I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation.” Well, when you’re a Nobel laureate in literature, you can sprinkle your own words like seasoning. The rest of us, however, have to be content with quoting others -- and maybe adding a pinch of our own wit.

And why not? We can tap into the wisdom of the ages through quotations, saving us the trouble of reinventing the wheel -- which might end up more square than round if we tried. Perhaps that’s why one of the most popular parts of A.Word.A.Day is the A THOUGHT FOR TODAY section.

This week, we’ll feature usage examples that are themselves food for thought -- in effect, five extra THOUGHTS FOR TODAY. Consider them a bonus snack for your mind’s daily cravings.

parturition

PRONUNCIATION:

(par-chuh/too-RISH-uhn)

MEANING:

noun: The act of giving birth.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin parturire (to be in labor). Earliest documented use: 1646

USAGE:

“A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book ‘means’ thereafter, perforce, -- both grammatically and actually, -- whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.”
“A Note on Cabellian Harmonics” by James Branch Cabell, in Warren McNeill; Cabellian Harmonics; Random House; 1928.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

To be nobody but myself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. -E.E. Cummings, poet (14 Oct 1894-1962)

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