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Jul 18, 2022
This week’s themeWords illustrated with AI This week’s words speechify agrostology smilet tergiversation meta 
Illustration: Anu Garg × DALL·E AI Previous week’s theme Words that appear to be misspelled 
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu GargA picture is worth a thousand words, so we try to find illustrations to accompany words we feature here. Sometimes it’s easy* to find them sometimes not. To illustrate this week’s words, we requested Mona Lisa (literally, Madam Lisa) and she graciously agreed to sit for five paintings in various styles. We are especially grateful because she’s more than 500 years old (you didn’t hear that from us, but in any case signora looks a fraction of her age.) Leonardo was unavailable (as usual, caught up in his graphomania), so we signed up DALL·E, a new arrival on the art scene. DALL·E is a very versatile painter, actually an AI system, that can generate images from a given prompt. The name is a portmanteau of WALL·E (a robot from the eponymous film) and Salvador Dalí. What are your thoughts? Share below or email us. As always, include your location (city, state). If you have access to DALL·E or another AI system like this, how would you illustrate this week’s words? Email your images to words@wordsmith.org. Speaking of another AI system, Google has come up with its own, Imagen, a very creative name, a blend of image + generation. We’d love to do a week of words accompanied by images made by Imagen. If you are with Google, please contact us at words@wordsmith.org. *We could have simply put a picture of Ted Cruz with the word speechify and be done with it, but we don’t want to take the easy route. Just because one Can does not mean one cun. speechify
PRONUNCIATION:
(SPEE-chuh-fy)
MEANING:
verb intr.: To make a speech, especially in a tedious or pompous manner.
ETYMOLOGY:
From speech, from Old English spaec/spreac (speech), from sprecan (to
speak) + -ify (to make), from Latin facere (to make or do). Earliest
documented use: 1723.
USAGE:
“It is wise to be sceptical when politicians speechify on religion.” One Nation Under Gods; The Economist (London, UK); Mar 3, 2012. See more usage examples of speechify in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison
have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us
understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on
the way people live and die. -Nelson Mandela, activist, South African
president, Nobel laureate (18 Jul 1918-2013)
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