Word of the Week is a bookish meme hosted by The Plain-Spoken Pen in which participants share a word that they find entertaining, enlightening, edifying, or just plain fun to say! Share your own word on your blog, then help us grow the meme and come share it with us!
I chose a GREAT word last week, one that I had heard but never knew what it meant. I never got around to writing about it and planned to use it this week instead. However, an email from Dr. Goodword this weekend changed my mind. . .
Our word this week is:
Pronunciation: /æn-fræk-chu-ês/
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1. Twisting, tortuously winding, full of hairpin turns, as an anfractuous road in the Alps. 2. Labyrinthine, convoluted, unnecessarily complicated.
When the "What's the Good Word?" email arrived, I had spent hours in frustration tinkering with a bit of software called Notion. My first encounter with it was via a BookTube vlog in which the host was showing how she used the program to organize her TBR and Wishlists and I thought, "Wow! This might be better than OneNote." Well, my initial experience with Notion definitely fit the second definition of anfractuous.
Dr. Goodword says that the word is "not used nearly enough. It has an intensive sense, that is, extremely twisted or tortuous, more complicated than necessary when talking about an argument or explanation." The email includes the in-use example, "The anfractuous instructions of how to operate the DVD player left us more bewildered than we were before reading them." Yup, fits my feelings towards Notion exactly. The adverb is anfractuously, and you may choose from the nouns anfractuousness or anfractuosity.
This week's word
comes from the usual source of English borrowings, Latin anfractus "winding", made up of am(bi)- "around" + fractus, the past participle of frangere "to break". For reasons not clearly understood, some PIE words have a Fickle N that appears in some forms, like frangere, but not in others, like fractus. It also arises in some languages but not in others, such as English break, which comes from the same original PIE root, bhre[n]g- "to break". The prefix ambi-, shortened and assimilated here, originally meant "from both sides", a meaning still detectable in words like ambidextrous. The meaning more usually was modified as in Greek amphi "around, about", German um "around, about" and Russian oba "both". Bhre(n)g- turns up in Sanskrit brhati "wrenches, tears away", Irish briseadh "break", German brechen "to break", Dutch breken "to break", and Swedish bräcka "to break, mine, modify".
alphadictionary.com
As for Notion, I am getting better at it. It has a steep learning curve to produce the more complicated (and aesthetically pleasing) results. I am now going through various tutorials and helpful videos to master the basics before moving on to more advanced tasks. I will not be replacing my beloved OneNote with it anytime soon!
Do you have any nifty words to share this week? Leave a comment and then share the meme on your blog!
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