Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word:
LACONIC
The Athenians were a gabby lot, but the soldierly Spartans were people, men mainly, of few words. From the Greek Lakon, Laconia or Sparta, and Lakonikos, we get the English word laconic (pronounced luh-KAHN-ik), meaning terse or concise to the point of appearing rude or mysterious.
Example: From a 1996 column by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times: "We would rather have a smiling, shape-shifting Democrat we don't trust than a frowning, laconic Republican we trust more."
LACONIC
The Athenians were a gabby lot, but the soldierly Spartans were people, men mainly, of few words. From the Greek Lakon, Laconia or Sparta, and Lakonikos, we get the English word laconic (pronounced luh-KAHN-ik), meaning terse or concise to the point of appearing rude or mysterious.
Example: From a 1996 column by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times: "We would rather have a smiling, shape-shifting Democrat we don't trust than a frowning, laconic Republican we trust more."
