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:
ABECEDARIAN
Oh, what the writers of the Phoenician and Hebrew languages started when the put
aleph
next to
beth
. That gave us the word
alphabet
, eventually, after they turned into the Greek
alpha
and
beta
. And from the shorthand term for the alphabet,
the ABCs
, we get the splendid word
abecedarian
(pronounced ay-bee-see-DAR-uh-an). It's from the late Latin
abecedarius
.
It can mean having to do with the alphabet, a synonym for
alphabetical
. But it can also be a noun, for a beginner, a novice, a tyro—someone just learning, like a child beginning to grasp the ABCs.
Example:
From Cotton's translation of Montaigne: "There is an Abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a Doctoral ignorance that comes after it."