Word Woman

Welcome to another mind-bending episode of Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! Looking for a way to stretch your mental muscles? Why not get a little intellectual exercise by doing crosswords, cyrptoquotes and sudoku? Or, you can expand your horizons by learning new words. Here's the Word of the Week to get you started:


Inauspicious: It has been remarked that "no other word ever had such a premiere as inauspicious," which made its debut in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Romeo crying:

Here, here will I remain...
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.

Shakespeare probably invented inauspicious, as he did auspicious (in The Tempest), meaning favorable, conducive to success. Its roots are in the Latin auspex, a corruption of avispex, for the Roman birdwatcher who deduced omens from the flight of birds. -- "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins", Robert Hendrickson, Checkmark Books, New York, 1997.


Example: Seeing the huge black thunderclouds gathering on the horizon, Peter decided that it was an inauspicious day for a picnic and ordered pizza instead.


Note to the Master of Socrates Cafe: The past tense of the verb "to forego" is indeed "forewent", regardless of how peculiar that may sound.