Wondrous Words Wednesday
Wondrous Words Wednesday is hosted by Bermudaonion’s Weblog. Kathy says: “Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading.”
This week’s Wednesday Word came from a conversation I had with my husband last night. He used the word piranha when he meant pariah. I corrected him and told him that piranha is that fish with teeth.
Photo by Robert Wallace, used under Creative Commons License. Click photo to see more of his work on Flickr.
Of course, he asked, “What is pariah?” Which is the moment I realized that pariah is one of those words that I can spell and use in a sentence, but don’t really know what it means.
I looked up pariah in the Oxford English Dictionary (accessible via my library card) and learned that pariah means outcast and comes from a Tamil word related to the Indian caste system. The OED implies that our usage is dependent upon a 19th-century European’s understanding of the Indian caste system, which I took to mean that what I learned in school might not be an accurate representation of reality in India.
Check Kathy’s post for today to learn more words.
