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Word of the Day for Monday, June 8, 2009tergiversation \tuhr-jiv-uhr-SAY-shuhn\, noun: 1. The act of practicing evasion or of being deliberately ambiguous. No doubt if I worked on it, I could evolve some kind of double-talk that would get around the offensive phrase, and make the, to me, face-saving implication; but to hell with that, I have too much respect for the English language, and for your understanding of it, to go in for tergiversation and weasely circumlocution. Like most writers, I have always championed thrift . . . . Not long ago, however, I experienced an extraordinary tergiversation. Now I'm an ally of excess, a proponent of redundancy. Tergiversation comes from Latin tergiversatus, past participle of tergiversari, "to turn one's back, to shift," from tergum, "back" + versare, frequentative of vertere, "to turn." The verb form is tergiversate. | |||||||||
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