Category / Words
Cool Word: Pugnacious
- hard-bitten: tough and callous by virtue of experience
- ready and able to resort to force or violence; “pugnacious spirits…lamented that there was so little prospect of an exhilarating disturbance”- Herman Melville; “they were rough and determined fighting men”
Cool Word: Woebegone
Woebegone: Affected by or full of grief or woe; “his sorrow…made him look…haggard and…woebegone”- George du Maurier
Definition Via:
Tip-Of-The-Tongue Moments Explained
Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences are common and become more frequent in old age. But what causes them? Deborah Burke of Pomona College and her team found that when we don’t use words often enough, our brain’s associations with that word become weakened. Tip-of-the-tongue moments became more frequent as the gray matter in the area called the left insula, an area of the brain that has been implicated in sound processing and production, declined.
Words aren’t stored as a unit,” Burke says. “Instead you have the sound information connected to semantic information, connected to grammatical information, and so on. But the sounds are much more vulnerable to decay over time than other kinds of information, and that leads to the TOT experience.”
Cool Word: Commensurate
Commensurate: Corresponding in size or degree or extent; “Pay should be commensurate with the time worked.”
Definition Via: wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
