im-PECH-oo-uhs
His impetuous decision to quit his job left him scrambling for options.
Fun Fact
“Impetuous” comes from Latin impetere, meaning “to attack.” It describes decisions made in the heat of the moment—often dramatic, sometimes disastrous. Romeo and Juliet? Totally impetuous. But so are startup founders, comedians, and adventurers—when it works, it’s brilliant.
ob-STREP-er-us
(adjective) Noisy, unruly, and difficult to control; stubbornly resistant to restraint or discipline.
The obstreperous crowd refused to disperse despite three separate announcements, their noise and defiance rising with every attempt to restore order.
Obstreperous derives from the Latin obstreperus, meaning “clamorous” or “noisy,” built from ob- (“against”) and strepere (“to make a noise” or “to rattle”). The root strepere is also the ancestor of strep in streptococcus — both words carrying the sense of something loud and disruptive making itself impossible to ignore. It entered English in the early 17th century, immediately acquiring its dual sense of both physical noisiness and the kind of willful, uncontainable defiance that produces it.
Fun Fact
The history of formal education is largely a history of attempting to manage obstreperous students — and occasionally failing spectacularly. Winston Churchill was considered so obstreperous at Harrow that his housemasters wrote letters home describing him as the most difficult boy in the school. Einstein was reportedly so disruptive and resistant to conventional instruction that one teacher told him directly he would never amount to anything. Edison was pulled from school entirely after only three months, his teacher having declared him too obstreperous to teach. The pattern is consistent enough that some educational psychologists now argue that obstreperousness in gifted children is less a behavioral problem than an early warning system for a mind that has outgrown its container.
Today's Word Obstreperous ob-STREP-er-us Definition (adjective) Noisy, unruly, and difficult...
Read MoreToday's Word Corpulence KOR-pyoo-lense Definition (noun) The state of being...
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