Okay, So I know that #WordlessWednesday is a thing, but I’m a writer by trade and I love using the perfect word for the situation so I’m going to try to do some #WordWednesday posts where I talk about a word and how it is used and / or misused. Maybe it will be a regular thing or maybe it will happen once a month. I’m not sure – but I love words and I love learning more about my favourite words.
Some of the words, I’ll choose because of the way they sound, others because I like the usage, others because I’ve stumbled across them and either had to look them up or work out the meaning for myself. This one I think I first learned while perusing (another fun word), Wordsmith.com ‘s Word of the Day archives a few years ago.
Okay, so I’m a total Latin geek – I took it in high school and in university simply because I love learning new words and Latin is a great basis for that – and any word that makes me think back to those Latin root words is going to make my day. I remembered when we learned that in Latin, cras means tomorrow. Suddenly the word procrastinate made a lot more sense – it literally means to put off until tomorrow. Which is all well and good, but what if you want to put something off until the day AFTER tomorrow? Surely there’s no English word for that right? Except there is! You guessed it, that word that means to put something off until the day after tomorrow is perendinate. The Latin root of this word is obviously dies or day. From there we get perendie which means “on the day after tomorrow” and ta-da – to perendinate is the action (verb form) of this, which means to put something off until the day after tomorrow.
So, to butcher an old proverb, never procrastinate when you could perendinate instead.
Perendinate – (puh-REN-di-nayt) Verb. To put off until the day after tomorrow.
There you go. Now use it wisely and impress your friends and family.
(The awesome photo in this post is by Staffage via: kaboompics.com a great website for people looking for public domain photos.)