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Mar 19, 2021
This week’s theme
Places that have given us multiple toponyms

This week’s words
coventry
Roman matron
Canterbury tale
Trojan horse
Kentish cousins

kentish
Photo: Duncan C

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Next week’s theme
Words borrowed from Yiddish
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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

Kentish cousins

PRONUNCIATION:
(KEN-tish kuh-zuhns)

MEANING:
noun: Distant relatives.

ETYMOLOGY:
After Kent, a county in England. Since most of the county is bounded by the sea and the river Thames, its citizens were not as mobile and intermarriages were common. Earliest documented use: 1796.

USAGE:
“It is due to the correspondence maintained between the Hampshire and the Kentish cousins that various facts relating to the period of Jane Austen’s girlhood were not long ago discovered by one of the authors of ‘Life and Letters’.”
Helen Amy; The Jane Austen Files; Amberley Publishing; 2015.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defense of our nation worthwhile. -Earl Warren, jurist (19 Mar 1891-1974)

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