Saturday, January 10, 2015

The Word -Adduce

He pulled the boy off the bed, unceremoniously wrapping him up in the tangled black fur rug before flinging him over his shoulder. "Sorry, no time for you to adduce me on why you shouldn't be kidnapped, noble snobbiness." He remarked, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards. The son hadn't made a peep yet, thanks to the drug running through his system. His arguments wouldn't hold up to the people in any case and he wouldn't be arguing in front of the more sympathetic and just as idiotic rulers in his class either. No, this was the last night for the son to be a noble. After this point...well...
With a quick glance around the room, the man left as quietly as he'd entered, not a soul around to have their last look of the yellow-bellied skink. This he had ensured earlier in the day. No one would know how, when, or just quite how the son had disappeared.
And he knew none would care beyond the parents. Good luck to them tracking him down. Where the son was going, none would know him.

Adduce - to offer as example, reason, or proof in discussion or analysis.

Added Info -We won't lead you astray over the history of "adduce;" it is one of a plethora of familiar words that traces back to the Latin root ducere, which means "to lead." Perhaps we can induce you to deduce a few other ducere offspring if we offer a few hints about them. One is a synonym of "kidnap," one's a title for a British royal, and one's another word for "decrease." Give up? They are "abduct," "duke," and "reduce," respectively. There are also many others, including "induce," which means "to persuade" or "to bring about."

Friday, January 2, 2015

The Word - Lunette

There would be no fancy trappings for the son now. The man smirked, revealing blackend eye teeth, the tips of them broken off. He moved from the unconscious boy, to the warison sitting pretty as a bird on top of the wooden armory. He pulled the gleaming lunette blade from it's sheath. It was a pretty trinket about half the length of his arm. The white gold hilt, gleamed, holding blade in place. It wouldn't have been the best of metals to use, but with the ivory enlaid in it, it would fare well enough. He tested the tip and drew back his thumb with red gleaming on it. Sharp. He smiled as the blood turned blue. Some magic to this as well, it would have to be in order to have such a rare material used as a working handle. The man pulled out a silken handkerchief, wiping the blade clean once more and returned to the son. Chanting softly in his native tongue, the man dropped the point of the blade over the boy's heart, dipping the point into his skin, deep enough to draw the life blood to the surface, but not to kill. Changing the tone of his chant, he watched as the blood flowed up the lunette, it turning blue before working its way back down the other side to return to the boy's body. From the entry , it spread out underneath the skin, keeping its darkened color leaving the mark of bonding there. No matter what he did now, the son would be unable to separate himself from the blade. The man smiled again, as the last words left his chapped lips. It would be the only possession from his old life that he would keep.

Lunette: 1: Something that has the shape of a crescent or half-moon. 2: the figure or shape of a crescent moon.

History Behind the Word- "Lunette," a word borrowed from French, looks like it should mean "little moon" --luna being Latin for "moon" and "-ette" being a diminutive suffix. There is indeed some 17th-century evidence of the word being used for a small celestial moon, but that meaning is now obsolete. Earlier, in the 16th century, "lunette" referred to a horseshoe having only the front semicircular part--a meaning that still exists but is quite rare. "Lunette" has other meanings too rare for our Collegiate Dictonary but included in our Unabridged.Among these are "a blinder especially for a vicious horse" and, in the plural form, "spectacles." (Lunettes is the usual term for eyeglasses in modern French.) The oldest meaning of "lunette" still in common use is "something shaped like a crescent or half-moon," which evidence dates to circa 1639.


Thursday, January 1, 2015

The Word - Warison

 The nobleman's son had to think the village was full of idiots to go babbling about his warison in the middle of a crowded bar. With the war going on, only a couple of hills over, and the warison`s mournful cry announcing that the battle had yet again been engaged did not much to boost the already beleaguered town's morale. To think that the yellow-bellied skink of a man had received a reward for engaging in this pointless feud and that he'd been rewarded handsomely for 'defending the king's land'. Well no longer. This idiot could learn the real reason to begin a fight, and not over a spilled drink at a party. Silently the man slipped into the son's room, filled with silk and all sorts of plushness of the soft and stupid. He would soon learn, as the man pressed the point of his dagger into the son's wrist, releasing the toxin stored there that would keep him unconscious, that bragging came at a cost. Methodically he stripped the son of all but the barest of clothing.
 
Warison: A bugle call to attack.
 
History Behind the Word - When Sir Walter Scott first encountered "warison" around the beginning of the 19th century, it was a rare word that had been around for 600 years, occasionally used to mean either "wealth or possessions" or "reward." In his 1805 poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Scott used the word to refer to a bugle call ordering soldiers to attack, probably because he misinterpreted what the word meant when he read it in "The Battle of Otterbourne," a ballad found in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The original word (which Scott encountered as Middle English waryson) derives from the Anglo-French garisun, which means "healing" or "protection" and is also the source of the English word "garrison," meaning "a military post."