You’d think it easy to spend five minutes a day reading a quick definition of a nifty, no-longer-used word, but I’m struggling, both to find the time and to muster the motivation. I’m mostly sticking with the discipline. Some days I find myself catching up on three or four days in arrears. All well and good.
Mar 11: to ostentate is to show off. This is one of Poole’s most “straight” words, for we’re all familiar with ostentation. The word I like today is enucleate, which has any number of technical meanings revolving around removing the nucleus from an object, including surgically excising an eyeball, but which I saw in the context of a bird snipping out boles of wood from a tree.
Source: A Word for Every Day of the Year by Steven Poole.