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Word of the Day for Saturday, February 19, 2011lucubration \loo-kyoo-BRAY-shun; loo-kuh-\, noun: 1. The act of studying by candlelight; nocturnal study; meditation. A point of information for those with time on their hands: if you were to read 135 books a day, every day, for a year, you wouldn't finish all the books published annually in the United States. Now add to this figure, which is upward of 50,000, the 100 or so literary magazines; the scholarly, political and scientific journals (there are 142 devoted to sociology alone), as well as the glossy magazines, of which bigger and shinier versions are now spawning, and you'll appreciate the amount of lucubration that finds its way into print. One of his characters is given to lucubration. "Things die on us," he reflects as he lies in bed, "we die on each other, we die of ourselves." Naturally, these fictions ran the risk of tumbling down the formalist hill and ending up at the bottom without readers -- except the heroic students of Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco, professors whose lucubrations were much more interesting than the books about which they theorized. Lucubration comes from Latin lucubratus, past participle of lucubrare, "to work by night, composed at night (as by candlelight)," ultimately connected with lux, "light." Hence it is related to lucent, "shining, bright," and lucid, "clear." The verb form is lucubrate. | |||||||||
 Words of the Day? How about words of timeless wisdom?Introducing our Quotes channel! "Life itself is a quotation." - Jorge Luis Borges | |||||||||
  What's the grossest sounding word in English? Let us knowA few months ago, we asked readers to share their choices for the most beautiful sounding word in English. Nearly 500 of you shared your favorites, which included the lyrical, delightful and uplifting. Read some of the highlights, here. Some of you not only shared your favorite but also least favorite words. "I would like to... | |||||||||
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