A.Word.A.Day --pudency

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Today's Word

pudency

PRONUNCIATION:

(PYOOD-n-see)

MEANING:

noun: Modesty, bashfulness.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin pudentia, from pudere (to make or be ashamed), which also gave us pudendum, impudent, pudibund (prudish), and pudeur (a sense of shame) Earliest documented use: before 1616.

USAGE:

“Levi and Charles were also ashamed, filled ‘with a painful sense of pudency’.”
Joan Acocella; A Hard Case; The New Yorker; Jun 17, 2002.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. -Gore Vidal, writer (3 Oct 1925-2012)

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