Welcome to another astonishing episode of Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! This is officially the first Word of the Week for 2010, and I'm looking forward to posting about 50 more of them before the year is over. Do I ever get tired of doing this? Not at all, because I'm such a logophile (word lover). Here's the Word of the Week:
Pecuniary: Pecu is the Latin for cattle, and since cattle were once a common means of barter, the ancients often expressed an estate's value in terms of the number of cattle it was valued at, which gave them the word pecunia, for "money or property". Pecunia, in turn gave birth to numerous English words , such as pecuniary, "pertaining to money"; impecunious, "without money"; peculate, "to embezzle"; and peculiar, "pertaining to that which is one's own", that is, one's own cattle. -- "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Words and Phrase Origins", Robert Hendrickson, Checkmark Books, New York, 1997
Example: Brad's pecuniary miscalculations led to his being fired from his job as an accountant.
No comments:
Post a Comment