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.
No comments:
Post a Comment