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Nov 16, 2015
This week’s theme
There’s a word for it

This week’s words
sitzmark
outro
solipsism
intrapreneur
bathos

sitzmark
Photo: creative_soul/Shutterstock

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

Every new word comes with the message that humanity hasn’t yet given up. It tells us we are still hopeful. We are still trying to make sense of the world around us. We want to find words that help us describe our thoughts, ideas, inventions, and whatever new comes up.

There are many ways we bring a new word into the language: by borrowing, by coining, by adapting an existing word in a new sense, and more. This week we’ll see some of the words that got added to the English language in various ways.

sitzmark

PRONUNCIATION:
(SITZ-mark, SITS-)

MEANING:
noun: A mark made by someone falling backward in the snow.

ETYMOLOGY:
From German sitzen (to sit) + mark. Earliest documented use: 1935. Two related words are sitzfleisch and sitzkrieg.

USAGE:
“He’d practically worn a sitzmark in the concrete there, so fond was he of that particular fishing hole.”
Marthanne Shubert; A Woman to Blame; Uncial Press; 2009.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
It has always seemed to me that the test of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised. -Chinua Achebe, writer and professor (16 Nov 1930-2013)

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