Sunday, August 7, 2011

Weekend Vocabulary

Yesterday was pretty busy for me, so a day slipped by without words.  But that's okay; we'll do a double today.

Inauspicious is a word which means ill-omened, or unfortunate, or unlucky.  To be inauspicious, an event or person had to be found against by augury, a manner of reading omens.  Auguries were of various sorts: entrails of sacrificial animals could be read, the flights of birds could be watched and analyzed, dreams could be consulted.  All of this was done by a person called an augur or sometimes an auspex, from which inauspicious as a word arises.  The Romans were huge on all of this sort of thing, and all these words come to us from Latin.

Really, it was kind of a triple, more than a double.  But all the words are related closely, so...we'll just call it a quick vocabulary and history lesson, and let that be the double. Have a good, auspicious Sunday.

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