Word of the Day Challenge

[PiscesDream]

 It was fascinating how twins could be that different despite being a reflection of each other. Amy was the good kid, the shy introvert whereas her sister, Kate, was the exact opposite- a force of nature, a rebel, a soul so free and adventurous that nothing could tie her down. Amy admired her, but she could never be her. But their differences never meant that they didn't have that bone-deep connection that twins shared. Since they were kids, every night before falling asleep, Kate would recite her adventurous to her sister animatedly and Amy would live vicariously through her- feeling connected to her other half even when they were worlds apart. 

[Brokk]

The door slammed behind Jace as he stormed into the room.  "Ugh.  I hate that professor!" The exclamation burst out from him like a sudden gale. "I spent weeks slaving over that stupid essay of his only to get an incomplete on it."

His mood caused Mary to flinch away in response. It was so out of character for him to be like that. "Did you get a chance to talk to him after class?" She asked softly, hoping not to upset him more with her question.

"You bet I did! I was so upset that I was fit to be tied. However, I did my best to keep a lid on my anger. After all that, he had the unmitigated nerve to allege that I cheated on my paper. It seems some student of his had picked the same topic two years ago. Aside from similar titles and the same subject, the papers had nothing in common. Mine made completely different points and arguments. I finally got him to back down and give me a proper grade.  Still only an 88, but I feel like I had to fight to get it." He declared, his anger seeming to finally deflate.

[Chasing Dreams]

When her friends dragged her to the party they deemed would be the best of the year,she didn't know what to expect.  She still wasn't sure how her friends got an invitation to the party, but she wasn't going to them about it.  The party was at the mansion in the grand neighborhood and as soon as they stepped inside, it felt like they were transported to a different time. The inside of the mansion was decorated in what she could describe as ancient Greece. She knew the party hosts were beyond rich and had the means to make their home into a conversation piece. When they stepped into the ballroom, the room itself had an ethereal appearance with  all the decor and then the grand and flows gowns most of the women in attendance were wearing. She had a hard time believing she was even there because it was something she'd remember for life.

[PiscesDream]

Damien Dupont walked into the room like he owned the place, and he technically did too. The new Art wing of the University where the Hockey team and their rowdy supporters had sneaked into after winning the State-level Championship, was built on the funding from his Father. His braggadocio would never let you think for even a moment that he was normal. Every turn of his head, every tilt of his mouth, every word that came out of it- screamed Money and Privilege.

[Brokk]

The rain pelted down outside leaving splatters of water upon the window. The wind seemed to howl as it played havoc with the raindrops as if they were small toys being batted about by an invisible cat. The trees bent all in the same direction as if bowing to a divine presence. It was surprising given the ferocity of the storm that it wasn't really a hurricane that he was witnessing outside.

His coworker arrived, her umbrella was torn to shreds, she was missing her hat, her hair looked like a tangled rat's nest and she was soaked and dripping wet from head to toe. While he typically thought of her as having a querulous personality, today her avid complaints had validity.

[Chasing Dreams]

There was nothing that she wanted more than to forget someone from her past because that person had given her nothing but bad memories and struggles with trusting those she met. She knew she had been lucky to get away when she had because though it had been three years since she had left him, certain things made the memories she tried to lock away surface. A news report had made her remember why she had listened to her intuition to leave after the man had lambasted her cruelly with words in front of his business associates. It had been awful because no one had tried to stop him and it had made all the little things she had dismissed as a out of the ordinary all make sense. She knew she needed to leave and got away and tried not to look back as she had even left the state for a fresh start.

[Brokk]

He stared at the screen numbly, his eyes simply re-reading the words over and over again as if they were somehow going to change. His mind simply couldn't grasp the reality of the message. After 5 years on the job with a flawless record, they were letting him go. Apparently his political activism inveighing against companies with a poor environmental track record had come to light with upper management.

[Chasing Dreams]

When she was asked to help organize the office of the CEO at the company, she was surprised to see that his office was the opposite of spotless. His office seemed like it was organized chaos and completely unlike the man who ran the company.  She was known for her organizational skills and ended up spending three days getting his office organized.  When she was meticulous in dealing with the work files and labeling so he could easily find what he needed. She made sure everything had a home and by the time she finished, his office looked like it belonged to him.

[PiscesDream]

Zarah had made up her mind about Rhiannon. She had seen the girl make unreasonable demands, fatuous arguments and throw temper tantrums better suited for a toddler. Those were not the kind of people she wanted to surround herself with. College was a fresh start to her life and she wanted to be extra careful about who she called a friend.

[Brokk]

It is fascinating how many people love to romanticize medieval times. The vast majority of the population were peasants or serfs. Life in general was brutally hard with no real knowledge or practice of hygiene. Diseases ran rampant through communities. Cities were even less salubrious with the contents of chamber pots being thrown out windows into the streets. It was quite literally a cesspool. Why anyone would ever want to live in such an environment is a mystery.

[Chasing Dreams]

She knew the task was to prove without a doubt that a statement that was made was true, but her partner was making it difficult.  All he was using were conjecture instead of real tangible proof. She had tried her best to get real evidence to prove the statement as true, but her partner was refusing to use any of it.

[Brokk]

It was a dreary Monday morning when he woke up feeling exhausted. He had overdone it with yard work the previous day and his body was filled with aches and pains. Even after a hot shower, he just wanted to go back to bed. That's when she walked in, a smile on her face and a steaming hot cup of coffee in her hand. "Good morning sunshine!" Her cheerful voice rang out to instantly lighten his mood. The room seemed to brighten with her presence as if she were his own personal luminary.

[Chasing Dreams]

She knew she didn't have much of a social life and she was okay with that. The one praxis she stuck to was taking the hot barre class as the yoga studio she found by accident.  It had been a year and a half since she had found the studio and she attended a class six days week because she loved it so much and made a few new friends she was looking forward to doing things with like going to concerts or movies.

[Brokk]

The sun beat down mercilessly like a hammer upon an anvil. Day after day it seemed to drive his body to a new low in weariness. If it weren't for the regular availability of water, the trip would have been deadly. He couldn't wait to reach his destination and his heart lifted with joy when he was finally able to descry the town.

[Chasing Dreams]

She adored traveling and had been able to travel to many places. She had planned on visiting several more that year, but ended up having to stay home and had to live vicariously through a friend who was able to travel the last two months to places she had planned on going to before she had to cancel her plans.

[Chasing Dreams]

She knew that her family reunion was something she was looking forward to because her cousins would all be there. They always had a great time and this summer was going to be no different.  She had already saw the group texts about the games they were going to play including having a water balloon fight.  She couldn't help but think about the potential spots for a redoubt depending on what team she would end up being on. 

[Chasing Dreams]

When she had been assigned to help out the design group for the extravagant ball their company was hosting, she had no clue what she was walking into. She had been told the two who were in charge were a bit eccentric, but always got the job done. When she she finally met them, she realized they had fatuous attitudes about work and seemed not to take it too seriously,  which was different for her. She struggled to get along with them because they let their relaxed personalities show and she was stressed things wouldn't get done.

[Chasing Dreams]

While she was new to the neighborhood, she could already tell her neighbors were trying to get her to conform to the way they did things. She wasn't sure the aegis of the neighborhood was something she was going to like at all and was regretting moving there.

[Brokk]

Despite the early hour of the day James found himself in an animated conversation with a waitress of the local coffee shop. Yesterday when he was leaving, there was a car accident that happened just after he stepped outside. He was describing the difference in damage between the large pickup truck and the small VW Beetle it had collided with. The Beetle had been crushed while the truck hardly showed a dent. A passing customer interjected that the Beetle was yellow, but James ignored that bit of information, as it was not germane to the point of his story.

[Chasing Dreams]

discomfit
verb| diss-KUM-fit
 

Definition

1    : to put into a state of perplexity and embarrassment : DISCONCERT
2a  : to frustrate the plans of : THWART
  b  : to defeat in battle



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Did You Know?

Disconcerted by discomfit and discomfort? While the two look similar and share some semantic territory, they’re etymologically unrelated. Unlike discomfort, discomfit has no connection to comfort, which comes ultimately from the Latin adjective fortis, meaning “strong.” Instead, discomfit was borrowed from Anglo-French in the 13th century with the meaning “to defeat in battle.” Within a couple centuries, discomfit had expanded beyond the battlefield to mean “to thwart,” a meaning that eventually softened into the now-common “to disconcert or confuse” use—one quite close to the uneasiness and annoyance communicated by discomfort. For a time, usage commentators were keen to keep a greater distance between discomfit and discomfort; they recommended that discomfit be limited to its original “to defeat” meaning, but they’ve largely given up now, and the “disconcert or confuse” meaning is fully established. There is one major difference between discomfit and discomfort, though: discomfit is used almost exclusively as a verb, while discomfort is much more commonly used as a noun than a verb.

[Chasing Dreams]

surfeit
noun| SER-fut
 

Definition

1 : an overabundant supply : EXCESS
2  : an intemperate or immoderate indulgence in something (such as food or drink)
3  : disgust caused by excess



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There is an abundance—you could almost say a surfeit—of English words that come from the Latin verb facere, meaning "to do." The connection to facere is fairly obvious for words spelled with "fic," "fac," or "fec," such as sacrifice, fact, and infect. For words like stupefy (a modification of the Latin word stupefacere) and hacienda (originally, in Old Spanish and Latin, facienda) the facere relation is not so apparent. As for surfeit, a "c" was dropped along the path that led from Latin through Anglo-French, where facere became faire ("to do") and sur- was added to make the verb surfaire, meaning "to overdo." It is the Anglo-French noun surfet ("excess"), however, that Middle English borrowed, eventually settling on the spelling surfeit.

[Chasing Dreams]

brusque
adjective| BRUSK
 

Definition

1  : markedly short and abrupt
2  : blunt in manner or speech often to the point of ungracious harshness



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If you’ve ever felt swept aside by someone with a brusque manner, that makes a certain amount of etymological sense. Brusque, you see, comes ultimately from bruscus, the Medieval Latin name for butcher’s broom, a shrub whose bristly, leaf-like twigs have long been used for making brooms. Bruscus was modified to the adjective brusco in Italian, where it meant “sour” or “tart.” French, in turn, changed brusco to brusque, and the word in that form entered English in the 1600s. English speakers initially applied brusque to tartness in wine, but the word soon came to describe a harsh and stiff manner, which is just what you might expect of a word bristling with associations to stiff, scratchy brooms.

[Chasing Dreams]

furlong
noun| FER-lawng
 

Definition

1  : a unit of distance equal to 220 yards (about 201 meters)


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Furlong is an English original that can be traced back to Old English furlang, a combination of the noun furh (“furrow”) and the adjective lang (“long”). Though now standardized as a length of 220 yards (or 1/8th of a mile), the furlong was originally defined less precisely as the length of a furrow—a trench in the earth made by a plow—in a cultivated field. This length was equal to the long side of an acre—an area originally defined as the amount of arable land that could be plowed by a yoke of oxen in a day, but later standardized as an area measuring 220 yards (one furlong) by 22 yards, and now defined as any area measuring 4,840 square yards. In contemporary usage, furlong is often encountered in references to horse racing.

[Chasing Dreams]

purloin
verb| per-LOYN
 

Definition

1  : to appropriate wrongfully and often by a breach of trust


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Picture a pie cooling on a windowsill. Peach, possibly, or perhaps plum—with perfect perfumed plumes puffing out from the holes poked in its crust. And then, suddenly, the pie is gone (as is our alliteration, at least for now). Those familiar with the classic pie-windowsill thievery of cartoons and comics know that the dessert has not been merely stolen, or even swiped, but purloined! Purloin comes from the Anglo-French verb purluigner, meaning “to prolong, postpone, or set aside.” English speakers of the 15th century borrowed purloin to use it in much the same way, applying it when someone sets something aside, concealing it so that it cannot be used by someone else. The sense meaning “to steal” developed not long after in the same century. The whiff of unseriousness often carried by purloin is not a constant; even today, it is common to read reports of people purloining large sums of money, not just delicious plum pies. But purloin does tend to carry the same particular piquancy as pinch and pilfer.

[Chasing Dreams]

inalienable
adjective| in-AY-lee-uh-nuh-bul
 

Definition

1  : incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred


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Alien, alienable, inalienable—it's easy enough to see the Latin word alius, meaning "other," at the root of these three words. Alien joined our language in the 14th century, and one of its earliest meanings was "belonging to another." By the early 1600s that sense of alien had led to alienable, an adjective describing something you can give away or transfer to another owner. The word unalienable came about as its opposite, but so did inalienable, a word most likely borrowed into English on its own from French. Inalienable is the more common form today, and although we often see both forms used to modify "rights," it was unalienable that was used in the Declaration of Independence to describe life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.