BAWK
She balked at the idea of skydiving, despite weeks of encouragement from her friends.
Fun Fact
“Balk” originally referred to an unplowed ridge of land in Old English. In baseball, a “balk” is an illegal move by the pitcher that stops play. Whether in sports or daily life, to balk is to hesitate—sometimes wisely, sometimes frustratingly!
LANG-ger
(noun) A state of pleasant tiredness or dreamy inactivity; a soft, luxurious lack of energy or motivation.
The long afternoon, the slow ceiling fan, and the smell of rain left her in a state of deep, contented languor.
From Old French langueur, from Latin languor, derived from languere (“to be faint, to be listless, to droop”). Related to lax, languid, and slack — all sharing the Indo-European root (s)lēg- meaning “to be loose or slack.” Languor has always described a state of pleasant looseness — the body gone soft, the mind unmoored.
Fun Fact
Languor was a prized condition in Romantic poetry — Keats in particular made a kind of art of it. His “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on Indolence” are essentially sustained meditations on the beauty of surrendering to a beautiful, purposeless drift. In the Victorian era, languor was also embraced by the Aesthetic Movement — figures like Oscar Wilde celebrated it as a mark of refined sensibility. To be languorous was to be too elevated for the crude busyness of ordinary life. Today, we might just call it a Sunday afternoon.
Today's Word Recidivism rih-SID-ih-viz-um Definition (noun) The tendency to relapse...
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