This week’s theme
Idioms & metaphors

This week’s words
beacon
security blanket
incandescent
nuclear option
lily-handed

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(LIL-ee-han-did)

MEANING:

adjective
1. Having delicate, pale hands, unaccustomed to manual labor.
2. Dandy; foppish; overly refined.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old English lilie, from Latin lilium, from Greek leirion. Earliest documented use: 1847.

NOTES:

Lily is one of various plants in the genus Lilium having flowers that come in white and other colors. The lily has long been associated with whiteness, for example, see lily-livered.

USAGE:

“[A] year roughing it in Australia on the sheep farms ... He was no longer the lily-handed young city executive who had flown from the city.”
Kenneth Bulmer; The Insane City; Gollancz; 2013.

“Presley remains an aesthete, a lily-handed poet, a tentative idealist.”
Reuben J. Ellis; “A Little Turn Through the Country”; Journal of American Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio); Fall 1994.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: