All The Words That Are Fit To Learn: May, 2020

Agitprop is a portmanteau word made from combining agit, as in agitation, "to shake things up" or "to disturb," with prop from propaganda, "spreading false or misleading information for political purposes." It was coined in Russia in the 1920s, originally describing a committee of the Comintern, the Communist International, an organization dedicated to spreading communism around the world.

Corpus means "body" in Latin. In English, you'll see it referring to an author's collected works, as in a body of work. It also appears in habeas corpus, the legal term for an arrested person's right to appear in court, and the corpus callosum a dense bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.

Crier means "to cry" or "to yell" in French. The de- prefix adds a pejorative sense, making it roughly equivalent to "call out" or "to condemn." So to decry something is to say, loudly and openly, that you disapprove of it.

In Greek, eskatos means "last" or "the end." Logia means "discourse," from logos, "word." Most of our words denoting fields of scientific or medical study, from anesthesiology to zoology, use this suffix. So eschatology is the study, in a philosophical or religious context, of death and the afterlife.

In medicine, indolent means "painless" — literally "no grief" — from the Latin dolens, meaning "grieving" plus the negating prefix in- that you know from words like insensitive and indivisible. In regular usage, however, it's a fancy way of saying "lazy."

From the Ancient Greek miniskos, meaning "little moon," a meniscus can be a lens, the convex surface of water at the lip of a full glass, or a disc of cartilage behind the kneecap: all things with the same crescent moon-shaped profile.

Paucity means "a lack," "a scarcity," or "not enough." It comes from the Latin paucitas, meaning "few" or "a small amount."

Propinquitas is Latin for "closeness," "nearness," or "kinship." In English, propinquity can refer to proximity in space or time, and also to blood relatives.

Unflappable was coined in the mid-twentieth century to describe someone not prone to frustration or excitability. A bird flaps its wings, and a flag flaps in the wind — these are sudden, back-and-forth movements. To be unflappable is to be steady, calm, and not easily flustered.

Vagari means "to wander" in Latin, and over time, after wandering through Italian as vagare, vagary arrived in English meaning rambling speech or writing, straying from an expected course, or a surprising turn of events.