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
: "