Today's Word

Yesterday's Word

Archives

FAQ

A.Word.A.Day--telic

telic (TEL-ik, TEE-lik) adjective

Tending toward a goal; expressing purpose.

[From Greek telikos, from telos (end). The word telephone comes from the same root.]

"Operation Telic" is the name of the British mission in the second Gulf War.

"A telic motivation starts with isolating a need and then feeling anxious about resolving it."
James B Twitchell; Needing the Unnecessary; Reason (Los Angeles, California); Aug/Sep 2002.

"As there is a semblance to Orwell's Animal Farm, one might call the work an allegory, but where Orwell designed a telic action with specific goals set for well-defined characters, `A Book of Pigs' forces upon its hero too many purposeless meanderings."
Alfreds Straumanis; Cuku Gramata; World Literature Today (Norman, Oklahoma); Sep 1, 1996.

Have you ever taken a vacation that's planned to every nanosecond? At 9:37 we visit the Garden of Standonburg and spend an hour and 18 minutes there, then we reach the Pamponi Museum at 11:09, and then .... Well, that's not a vacation, is it? Sometimes it's best to let yourself roam through what may come, with no plan, no schedule, no rules, no aim and nothing to guide except a free mind and open heart.

This week's AWAD is prepared in just that spirit. A word tickles our fancy and leads us to some others that bring forth new sights. We skip some of them, move ahead or perhaps take a leisurely stroll through the dictionary. There is nothing common among the words selected--at least as far as we know. There is no theme to constrain our word choices during the next five days. Or maybe that's the theme. Well, you decide.

-Anu

X-Bonus