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Word of the Day for Saturday, January 10, 2009fastidious \fa-STID-ee-uhs\, adjective: hard to please; extremely refined or critical For months, his tall, fastidious figure had prowled around the old city hall on Wall Street, examining its eighty-year-old brickwork, muttering to himself in French, or his syntactically challenged English, imagining-where others saw merely a tired old workhorse of a building-a blank canvas upon which to paint an architectural epic. Penske cannot say for sure that being fastidious off the racetrack results in being fast on it. What he can say, though, is that he has created a culture that has fostered loyalty. c 1440, "full of pride," from Latin fastidiosus "disdainful, squeamish, exacting," from fastidium "loathing," most likely from fastu-taidiom, a compound of fastus "contempt, arrogance" and tædium "aversion, disgust." The meaning "squeamish, over-nice" emerged in England by 1612. | |||||||||
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