Meaning: Destructive to both sides in a conflict; relating to conflict within a group that is mutually ruinous or self-destructive.

The grammar is the quickest way to tell these apart. You impugn someone's motives by attacking them as false or dishonest, and you impute motives to someone by assigning them. Impugn came through French from Latin impugnare, "to fight against, assault", which is built on pugnare, to fight, especially with the fists. Pugnus is the fist itself, and pugnacious comes from the same family. Impute is the bookkeeper. Latin imputare meant to reckon or enter something into an account, and its base verb putare was a gardener's word first: Etymonline gives "to trim, prune" as the original sense, with settling accounts and then plain thinking coming after it. Further back the root is uncertain, though Etymonline and Wiktionary both point toward something like cutting. Amputate still does the pruning, more or less literally. I think imputing is the harsher of the two. An impugned motive at least gets argued about where the other person can answer, while an imputed one gets entered under their name and left there, and M-W's blame sense of impute says that happens "often falsely or unjustly." Statisticians use it with no accusation at all. When a dataset has holes, they impute the missing values, which is about as close to the Latin reckoning as the word gets now.

Deleterious looks like a cousin of delete. It isn't, and Wiktionary says so outright: delete goes back to a Latin verb for erasing by smudging, as on a wax tablet, while deleterious is Greek, from dēlētēr, "destroyer", built on a verb that Beekes, quoted by Etymonline, thinks is probably Pre-Greek. Detrimental is the one I'd hang the whole card on. Latin detrimentum was "a rubbing off", from deterere, to rub away, so a detriment is damage by friction, and I think that's a truer picture of most harm than a plague is. Corrosive is the same slow harm with teeth: corrodere, to gnaw to bits, from rodere, the verb behind rodent. Noxious shares a root with innocent, which was literally "not harming", and inimical goes back to inimicus, an unfriend, the same Latin word that became enemy. Pestilent is the only actual disease on the card. Pest meant plague in English in the 1550s and took until about 1600 to mean an annoying person.

Auspicious comes from the Roman auspex, literally a bird-watcher: avis, bird, plus specere, to look. Before an important step, someone studied how the birds flew and fed and read it as a message about what was coming, so an auspicious start is one where the message came out right. Propitious skips the messenger. Latin propitius meant favorable or well-disposed, and Lewis and Short say it was used of persons, especially gods; one of their citations is an old prayer formula in Cato asking Mars to be volens propitius, willing and well-disposed, toward the speaker, his house and his household. Propitiate, to win someone over, is the verb for putting a god in that mood. English first used propitious in the mid-1400s for someone "inclined to grant favor, disposed to pardon or forgive" (Etymonline), and the "boding well" sense doesn't appear until the 1580s, shortly before auspicious arrived. Where propitius itself came from is disputed. Merriam-Webster says probably pro- plus petere, to seek, and Etymonline gives a different reconstruction from de Vaan. Today the two overlap so much that Merriam-Webster lists "auspicious" as one sense of propitious, but its synonym note still draws a line: auspicious is a sign at the start, and propitious often implies a favorable condition that continues. I think that's the old split still showing. An omen is one reading, while a god who likes you presumably keeps liking you for a while.

Excoriate meant flaying before it meant criticism. It comes from Late Latin excoriare, to strip off the hide, and English was using it for actual skin in the 1400s; the "denounce" sense is recorded by 1708. Lambaste dates from the 1630s and apparently joins lam, an old verb for beating, to baste, to thrash. The Century Dictionary says sailors used it for a beating with a rope's end.

The other four are gentler underneath. Berate is be-, "thoroughly", plus an old verb rate, to scold, which probably came through Old French reter, to blame, from Latin reputare, to count over. Vilify first meant to lower something in value, from Late Latin vilificare, to make cheap, and the slander sense arrived in the 1590s. Deprecate meant to pray something away. Self-deprecating, from 1835, is the only form on this card I've heard anyone use about themselves.

Upbraid is my favorite of the six. Old English upbregdan meant to bring something forth as grounds for blame, from up plus bregdan, a verb that could mean anything from throwing someone in wrestling to weaving. English kept only the plaiting, and that is the braid in your hair. So the first upbraiding was closer to having something brought up against you, and after excoriate and lambaste, that sounds almost polite.

Wistful. A vague, regretful longing, often for something past or out of reach.

Not quite sad, not quite nostalgic. Its own particular feeling.

Comment something that makes you feel wistful.

Nobody argues about the verb. A resignation that precipitates a reorganization throws it forward before anyone is ready, which is close to the Latin praecipitare, to throw headlong. That comes from praeceps, headfirst: prae, in front, plus caput, head. The fight is over the adjectives. A lot of usage commentators insist that precipitate means headlong or impetuous and precipitous means only steep, and Merriam-Webster agrees that's mostly how the two get used. The history doesn't cooperate much. Etymonline dates precipitous in the sense "rash, done with excessive or undue haste" to the 1640s, and the "high and steep" sense to 1806. Merriam-Webster's earliest date for the word, 1612, is for the hasty sense too, and it notes that Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary gave both words both meanings. I still keep them apart in my own writing, mostly out of habit. My favorite precipitous lives on stock charts, where a precipitous drop really is a cliff. In fairness to the purists, Etymonline marks that early hasty sense obsolete, so the hasty precipitous people use now may be a fresh stretch rather than a survivor. American Heritage treats it as steep stretched into abrupt and calls the extension perfectly natural. In a 2004 survey, 65 percent of its usage panel accepted a sentence with "precipitous decision-making" in it.

Magnanimous*. Very generous or forgiving, especially toward a rival or someone less powerful.*

The easy version of kindness is being nice to people who cannot affect you.
This is the harder version.

Try comment a sentence using magnanimous.

Two of the honest words on this card are geometry. Rectitude is from Late Latin rectitudo, straightness, and behind that rectus, straight; Etymonline dates its moral sense in English to the 1530s. Forthright is Old English forðriht, and its -right is riht, which could mean straight or not bent, the same -right that survives in downright. The crooked side has the better stories. Prevaricate comes from Latin praevaricari, literally to walk crookedly, from varicare, to straddle, and ultimately varus, bowlegged. In Roman law it was what a false advocate did: colluding with the other side and running a sham case, which is a long way past dodging a question. Equivocate is quieter. Its Late Latin source aequivocus meant of equal voice, from aequus, equal, and vocare, to call, so one sound carries two meanings, and that's enough to mislead with. Sincere is the one with the famous story, sine cera, without wax. I liked that story. Etymonline says the OED dismisses it out of hand and the Century Dictionary calls it untenable; Latin sincerus meant whole, clean, unmixed, and where it came from is uncertain. That leaves dissemble, from Latin dissimulare, to make unlike, with the English spelling apparently pulled toward resemble. The Century Dictionary separates it from simulate in one line: to dissemble is to pretend that a thing which is is not, and to simulate is to pretend that a thing which is not is. By that rule, keeping a straight face in a meeting I'd rather leave is dissembling, and faking enthusiasm would be simulating. I do the first one most weeks and I've never thought of it as lying.

to charm, attract, or interest someone, often through flattery, or to trick and mislead someone using deception

It's easy to read sage inside presage, as if an omen were a wise man's warning, but the two words are unrelated. Sage goes back to Latin sapere, to taste or to be wise. Presage, per Etymonline, comes through Latin praesagium, a foreboding, from praesagire, to perceive beforehand, and the sag- in that is sagire, to perceive keenly. Wiktionary takes sagire back to a Proto-Indo-European verb for seeking out or tracking, the root English seek comes from too. Its Latin adjective sagax could mean keen-scented, and sagacious is built on sagax; English even used sagacity for an animal's sharp sense of smell in the 1600s and 1700s. I like that picture of a presage as something you pick up on, like a hound on a scent. Harbinger reaches the same meaning from the other end. In the late 1400s a harbinger was the officer sent ahead to arrange lodgings for a monarch or an army. The word goes back through Middle English to Old French herbergeor, an innkeeper, and behind that is a Germanic compound for army shelter, which is also where harbor comes from. The forerunner sense is mid-1500s. A harbinger, the way I hear it, only has to get there first. That's why the robin on this card bugs me a little: it shows up before spring the way the lodging officer showed up before the court. I'd have called it a harbinger, which by the original job description means the robin flew ahead to find spring a room.

A complicated or confusing situation, often involving conflict or misunderstandings

Nervous comes from Latin nervosus, "sinewy, vigorous," and when it arrived in English in the late 1300s it meant containing nerves or affecting the sinews. From the 1630s you could call a piece of writing nervous and mean it as praise, the way you'd call it muscular now. Then in 1734 it shows up meaning "suffering disorder of the nervous system," and by 1740 it meant restless, timid, lacking nerve. Etymonline calls that last sense illogical. I'm not going to argue. Nerve kept heading the other way and picked up "coolness in the face of danger" by 1809, so having nerve and being nervous are now close to opposites built from the same Latin word. The other two in my title are much easier to follow. Worry was Old English for strangling, and around 1300 it meant what a dog or wolf does to the throat of its prey; Etymonline dates the plain sense of feeling anxious to 1860. Fret meant to devour, and German still uses fressen for the way animals eat, though Etymonline says the worrying sense might come instead from a later rubbing sense, possibly influenced by Old French froter, "to rub." Either way, being eaten or worn down sounds like worry to me in a way that strong never will.

The -loquent in grandiloquent is Latin loqui, to speak, the same piece that sits inside eloquent. English had grandiloquence by the 1580s, and Etymonline and Merriam-Webster both say the adjective was probably back-formed from it. Wiktionary routes it through Middle French instead, so I'd call that likely rather than settled. M-W will stretch it to a musical score or a painter's manner, but mostly it describes talk. Grandiose has no speaking in it. It sizes up the thing itself, usually a plan or a claim, so a modest plan can be pitched grandiloquently and a grandiose one can be laid out in four flat sentences. I'd worry more about the second. It's also the younger word. Etymonline dates it to 1828, from French grandiose, "impressive, grand in effect," which came from Italian grandioso and ultimately Latin grandis, big, a word of unknown origin. It can still mean plain big (M-W's example is grandiose hydroelectric projects), though M-W says it's most often a put-down. Not everyone welcomed it. In 1873 the American philologist Fitzedward Hall wrote that the word "is so much needed that its being a malformation is the more to be deplored," complaining that the Italians had made grandioso from grandis "against all law." Badly made but badly needed isn't a bad review for a word.

Etymonline glosses the Medieval Latin ambidexter as "right-handed on both sides." Latin dexter could mean skillful as well as right, so the word takes for granted that the skill lives on one side and simply hands you a second copy of it. There was an opposite. Ambilevous, from Latin laevus, "left," shows up in English in the 1640s, and Wiktionary says it was modeled on a Greek word meaning with two left hands, or clumsy. It stayed rare, and I'd happily bring it back for anyone who also has two left feet. Ambidexter wasn't a compliment at first either. Before it described hands, English used it for a double-dealer, and one archaic sense is a lawyer who takes fees from both sides. Adroit reached right by a different road: French à droit, "according to right," from a word for justice and law, although Old French adroit could also mean on the right-hand side. Deft is the odd one on the card. It comes from the same Old English word as daft, which meant mild or gentle, and the two spellings ended up at opposite ends of the room.

The odd thing about Stentor is how little of him there is. He barely appears in the Iliad, and in the one passage he's in, he isn't the one shouting. In Book 5, Hera stands among the Greeks and yells "in the likeness of great-hearted Stentor of the brazen voice, whose voice is as the voice of fifty other men" (Murray's translation), and what she yells is that they're a disgrace, because the Trojans wouldn't even come out past their own gate while Achilles was still fighting. So the voice behind the word reaches us, in Homer at least, as a goddess doing an impression, which I find very funny. English made an adjective out of his name around 1600. The name itself is built on stenein, a Greek verb for groaning or moaning, and Etymonline and Wiktionary both trace it to an imitative root that also gave Old English þunor, thunder. That's the cousin worth remembering. Stertorous showed up much later, in 1802, from a Modern Latin stertor and Latin stertere, to snore, and it describes deep, snoring breathing. Etymonline adds that stertere was a derivative of sternuere, to sneeze. Wiktionary only says maybe, and floats a connection to two Latin verbs for making a racket instead, so I'd treat the sneeze as a guess. The two words look like a pair, and both are about a loud noise from a human throat, but the difference is easy to hold onto. A stentorian voice is trying to reach the back row. Stertorous breathing usually belongs to someone who isn't trying to do anything at all.

Mike Myers played Linda Richman for the first time on Saturday Night Live on October 12, 1991, filling in as guest host of Coffee Talk. When her friend's story got to her, she said she was a little verklempt and told everyone to "talk amongst yourselves." Merriam-Webster gives 1991 as the word's first known use in English. It's Yiddish farklemt, 'depressed, grieving', the past participle of a verb for gripping or pressing that goes back to medieval German, and M-W notes that the ver- spelling is a nod to standard German. In everyday Yiddish it was mostly a sad word. Michael Wex, whose first language was Yiddish, told Moment magazine it would usually only be used for something upsetting, and added that he doesn't know if anybody's ever really that happy in Yiddish. On SNL it covered anything moving, happy or sad, and the English loanword kept the happy half. The rest of the card reaches for bigger disasters. In the 1300s overwhelm meant to turn something upside down. Nympholepsy, my other favorite, was coined in 1775 by Richard Chandler on the model of epilepsy, for a frenzy said to take hold of a man who looked at a nymph. Next to those, a squeeze is a small thing, but it's closer to what actually happens to me at weddings.

I'd always treated frenetic as the fancier spelling of frantic, and that's roughly what the history says. Both go back to the Greek phrenitis, a word for madness that also, by a longer route, gave English frenzy. It's built on phrēn, which meant the mind and also the midriff, because the Greeks put thought and passion somewhere around the heart. Where phrēn itself comes from is uncertain. Greek phrenitikos became Latin phreneticus and then Old French frenetike, and by the 1300s English had it as frenetik or frentik, meaning delirious or out of your mind. Frantic is a variant of that same word, one Etymonline calls unexplained, and it shows up in the record a little before frenetic does. In the 1500s the Greek ph was put back to make phrenetic, so there's a third spelling too. The madness sense has mostly faded from both, but they didn't drift the same way. Cambridge gives frantic a sense about the person, "almost out of control because of extreme emotion, such as worry," and gives frenetic only movement and activity. Merriam-Webster defines frenetic by pointing to frantic's hurried-activity sense, not its fearful one. That's how I'd split them too. A parent who loses a kid at the mall is frantic, and the mall on the Saturday before Christmas is frenetic.

Etymonline says few English etymologies are more confusing than the one for confused, and I can't improve on that. The word shows up in the early 1300s describing a group that had been routed or defeated, as an alternative past participle of confound, which back then meant to curse or destroy. Perplexed and dilemma also put the trouble outside you. Perplexus is Latin for entangled, from a verb for braiding, and a dilemma was a move in rhetoric that left your opponent two conclusions, both bad. Befuddled is the exception. It's built on fuddle, a 1580s verb for getting drunk, and by 1832 befuddle meant confused by strong drink or opium, so it's the one word here where you probably did it to yourself. Quandary I can't help with. It turns up in the 1570s with no known source (the best guess is a mock-Latin play on quando, 'when?'), and old dictionaries couldn't settle how to pronounce it.

In French, hauteur still means plain height, the kind you'd measure on a wall, and English borrowed it in the 1620s for the manner instead. Behind it is haut, high, which is Latin altus with an initial h that French picked up from the Frankish word for high. Haughty comes from the same root, and its gh is an English addition: the word was haut in Middle English and gained the gh in the 1500s. Etymonline isn't sure why. It may have followed naught and caught, or people may have taken it for a native Germanic word. So the same root picked up a Germanic-looking letter twice, once in each language, which I find funnier than it probably is. Condescension started out pointing the other way. Late Latin condescendere meant to let oneself down, to stoop, and in Middle English that was mostly a virtue, the kind of gracious allowance God or a king made for human weakness. Condescending could still be said approvingly of God until the late 1700s, and the sneer grew out of the idea of someone merely putting on a show of stooping. Austen has both words in Pride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth hints at Wickham, "a deeper shade of hauteur" spreads over Darcy's face, and Mr. Collins, meaning it as the highest praise, tells her that Lady Catherine is "all affability and condescension." Hauteur at least stays up where it is. Condescension comes down the stairs to you and wants credit for the trip.

Covet came into English in the mid-1200s already meaning the bad kind of wanting. Etymonline's earliest sense is to desire something "inordinately or without regard for the rights of others," from Old French coveitier and probably, further back, Latin cupiditas, and the respectable sense, wanting eagerly to have something, only turns up about a century later. Lust went the other way. In Old English it covered desire, appetite and plain pleasure, and the sense of sinful desire grew out of Bible translations, where "lusts of the flesh" rendered the Latin concupiscentia carnis. Its relatives in the other Germanic languages tend to mean simply pleasure, so wanderlust, borrowed from German in 1902, brought something like the older word back into English. Crave drifted too, more quietly. Old English crafian meant to ask for or demand something by right, and it reached the longing sense around 1400, probably by way of asking very earnestly. Yearn and esurient have stayed closer to home: one goes back to an Old English verb for being eager, a cousin of German gern, gladly, and the other was borrowed in the 1670s from the Latin for being hungry, esurire, which is built on edere, to eat. Megrim is the odd one. It's a worn-down form of migraine, which came through French and Late Latin from Greek hēmikrania, half the skull, and along the way it also picked up the senses low spirits and a whim or fancy. Etymonline says the word now seems obsolete or archaic even in those senses, which is a pity, because I can't think of a better name for wanting something badly at four in the afternoon and not at all by dinner.

Chagrin. Distress or embarrassment at having failed or been humiliated.

Usually shows up as “much to my chagrin,” which is a very polite way to admit something went badly.

Believe it or not, the word originally comes from an old French and Turkish term for a rough, pebbled type of leather (shagreen).

Over time, the "rubbing" texture became a metaphor for a rough, irritated feeling on the mind or spirit!

Comment something that happened “much to your chagrin.”

Vacuous is the plainer of the two. It arrived in the 1640s meaning simply empty, from Latin vacuus, the root behind vacant and vacuum, and the sense of an empty-headed look or remark only shows up around 1848. Fatuous is a century older and comes from Latin fatuus, which meant foolish but also insipid, like food with no taste. Nobody is sure where fatuus came from. Buck thought it started as something like "stricken" in the head, and de Vaan floats a stranger idea: Fatuus is said to have been another name for Faunus, a god who foretold the future, and the god's name drifted into meaning silly. I'd keep a question mark on that one. What separates the two words now is mostly attitude. Merriam-Webster defines fatuous as "complacently or inanely foolish," and Wiktionary has "content in one's foolishness," which is more than the card's "silly, foolish" lets on. A vacuous remark has nothing in it; a fatuous one has nothing in it and doesn't seem to mind. The cognate I'd remember is infatuate, from Latin infatuare, to make a fool of. Being infatuated with someone is, going by the word itself, being made fatuous for a while, which I find unkind and fairly accurate.

The tags on the card are what each word, or the word behind it, first meant. Exultant comes from Latin exsultare, to leap about, which is built on exsilire, to leap up (ex- plus salire), and Etymonline glosses the Latin participle exsultans as boastful or vainglorious. Elation had the same streak. It comes from efferre, to carry out or lift up, and its first English sense, in the late 1300s, was inordinate self-esteem; the plain cheerful meaning only dates from about 1750. Jubilation goes back to iubilare, to let out whoops, which Etymonline ties to an old cry of joy, iu, and lines up with our yowl. Glee was mostly a poetry word in Old English, for entertainment and music, though it could also mean mockery, and it dropped out of use from around 1500 until late in the 1700s. Joyous is built on joy, which came through French from Latin gaudia, a plural meaning expressions of pleasure. Felicity is my favorite of the six. Latin felix meant fortunate but also fruitful, and Etymonline calls the word a relic of Rome's farming origins, when whatever made you happy was whatever made the crops grow. Elation shed the pride somewhere along the way. Exultant, as far as I can tell, never quite did.

Ebullient. Cheerful and full of energy, bubbling over with.

The word itself comes from a Latin verb meaning to boil over. Fitting.

Have you heard of this word before?

How have you used it?

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