This week’s theme
Illustrated words

This week’s words
gramarye
quacksalver
viridity
yobbery
xenophile

---

A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(KWAK-sal-vuhr)

MEANING:

noun: A quack: one pretending to have skills or knowledge, especially in medicine.

ETYMOLOGY:

From obsolete Dutch (now kwakzalver), from quack (boast) + salve (ointment). Earliest documented use: 1579.

NOTES:

Did the quacksalver hawk their concoctions of quicksilver (mercury) as a panacea to earn the name quacksalver? While the connection with quicksilver is enticing, it’s their duck-like behavior while peddling the snake oil that gave us this colorful synonym for a charlatan. Imagine someone mounted on a bench, holding vials of solutions in assorted colors while claiming to cure everything from chronic back pain to pyorrhea to migraine, and you’d have a good idea of a quacksalver. In fact, this image is the source of another term for these cure-alls: mountebank.

USAGE:

“In Elizabethan times nutmeg ... was trumpeted by the physicians and quacksalvers as a sovereign remedy against the plague.”
Charles Nicholl; Scary Tales of an Old Spice World; The Independent (London, UK); Feb 20, 1999.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: