PAL-ee-ayt
(verb) To reduce the severity of something without removing its cause; to ease or alleviate.
Medication can palliate the symptoms, but it won’t cure the disease.
Fun Fact
“Palliate” comes from Latin palliare, “to cloak.” It refers to masking pain or consequences, especially in medicine or diplomacy. Palliative care focuses on comfort, not cure—a way to preserve dignity and reduce suffering when solutions are limited.
jih-JOON
(adjective) Lacking substance, interest, or mature thought; naive and simplistic in a way that reveals inexperience.
The critic dismissed the debut novel as jejune — competently written, technically adequate, and utterly devoid of anything worth remembering.
Jejune derives from the Latin jejunus, meaning “fasting” or “empty” — literally describing a stomach that has not been fed. The same root gives us jejunum, the section of the small intestine named for its tendency to be found empty after death. It entered English in the 17th century carrying its literal sense of emptiness before acquiring its figurative meaning of something intellectually or creatively hollow — content that has the form of nourishment without any of the substance.
Fun Fact
The jejunum — the middle section of the small intestine — was named by ancient anatomists who consistently found it empty when they performed dissections, leading them to conclude it was always in a state of fasting. Modern medicine knows this isn’t quite true, but the name stuck, giving us a rare example of a word that lives simultaneously in gastroenterology and literary criticism. The next time a reviewer calls something jejune, they are technically comparing it to an empty stretch of digestive tract — which, when you think about it, is one of the more precise insults the English language has ever produced.
Today's Word Obstreperous ob-STREP-er-us Definition (adjective) Noisy, unruly, and difficult...
Read More