This week's theme: red-herring words. hardscrabble (HARD-skrab-uhl) adjective
1. Yielding little for much effort. 2. Relating to a place that provides for bare subsistence. [From English hard + Dutch schrabbelen (to scrape). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sker- (to cut) that's also the source of words such as skirt, sharp, scrape, screw, shard, shears, carnage, curt, and carnivorous.] Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=hardscrabble -Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) "How did young Mildred, a homely, chubby, fatherless kid, reared on a hardscrabble Iowa farm during the Great Depression manage to work up the genius to relish every minute of her life?" Elizabeth Gilbert; The Home Place; The New York Times; Jul 1, 2007. Sponsored by: The Desk Drawer: Ready for a nudge to write more? Tired of hiding your words in a closet? http://www.winebird.com/ Always find the right word with the Visual Thesaurus. Wordsmith readers save 10%. Try it free! http://www.visualthesaurus.com/?ad=aw&code=p17 ............................................................................ Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from that of their social environment. -Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Our privacy policy: AWAD mailing list addresses are never sold, rented, leased, traded, swapped, exchanged, or bartered. We hate junk mail. Pronunciation: http://wordsmith.org/words/hardscrabble.wav http://wordsmith.org/words/hardscrabble.ram Permalink: http://wordsmith.org/words/hardscrabble.html This message was sent to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]".
