Word of the Week!

Dante and Virgil

From “The Man In The Black Suit” in Everything’s Eventual, by Stephen King:

Propitiate (pg 69) - (transitive, dated) To conciliate, appease or make peace with someone, particularly a god or spirit.

(I guess that’s what you do when you think the devil is going to eat you.)

From The Book Mine Set:

Asymtote - In analytic geometry, an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity. Some sources include the requirement that the curve may not cross the line infinitely often, but this is unusual for modern authors.[1] In some contexts, such as algebraic geometry, an asymptote is defined as a line which is tangent to a curve at infinity.

1. (analysis) A straight line which a curve approaches arbitrarily closely, as they go to infinity. The limit of the curve, its tangent "at infinity".

2. (by extension, figuratively) Anything which comes near to but never meets something else.

(I knew it was some sort of math thing, I just didn’t know what exactly.)

From here

So… a PDF program taught me a word (Win2PDF):

Prepend - (computing, linguistics, transitive) To attach (an expression, phrase, etc.) to another, as a prefix.

(The PDF program asked me if I wanted to Append, Prepend, Replace or Cancel; I had to figure out what Prepend was.)

Thanks for joining me.  Learn anything new this past month (or even year!)?