This week’s theme
Food as metaphor

This week’s words
bouillabaisse
cherry-pick
rechauffe
saccharine
farrago

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(CHER-ee-pik)

MEANING:

verb tr.: To pick in a highly selective manner. Example, to cherry-pick data to suit a hypothesis.

ETYMOLOGY:

From the idea of picking the best cherries from a tree. Earliest documented use: 1966.

USAGE:

“Inevitably, there will be factions that cherry-pick findings from our study to bolster their agendas.”
Michael Casserly; A Cap on the Amount of Testing Time is the Wrong Answer for Schools; The Washington Post; Oct 30, 2015.

NOTES:

Agenda (a list of things under consideration) is a plural of Latin agendum, but it’s now fairly well established as a singular. So the plural agendas in today’s example sentence is perfectly fine. If it bothers you, perhaps you’d like to use today’s term as cherise-pick, instead of cherry-pick. The word cherry is from Middle English cherise/cheris, which was mistaken for a plural and a singular cheri made from it. In French, a cherry is still une cerise.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: