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earthobservatory_iod_feed
The “young” and well-preserved crater helps scientists understand cratering processes on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system.
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susandennis
urban_feedsusandennis
merriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 3, 2025 is:
desultory • \DEH-sul-tor-ee\ • adjective
Desultory is a formal word used to describe something that lacks a plan or purpose, or that occurs without regularity. It can also describe something unconnected to a main subject, or something that is disappointing in progress, performance, or quality.
// After graduation, I moved from job to job in a more or less desultory manner before finding work I liked.
// The team failed to cohere over the course of the season, stumbling to a desultory fifth place finish.
Examples:
“One other guy was in the waiting room when I walked in. As we sat there past the scheduled time of our appointments, we struck up a desultory conversation. Like me, he’d been in the hiring process for years, had driven down from Albuquerque the night before, and seemed nervous. He asked if I’d done any research on the polygraph. I said no, and asked him the same question. He said no. We were getting our first lies out of the way.” — Justin St. Germain, “The Memoirist and the Lie Detector,” New England Review, 2024
Did you know?
The Latin adjective desultorius was used by the ancient Romans to describe a circus performer (called a desultor) whose trick was to leap from horse to horse without stopping. English speakers took the idea of the desultorius performer and coined the word desultory to describe that which figuratively “jumps” from one thing to another, without regularity, and showing no sign of a plan or purpose. (Both desultor and desultorius, by the way, come from the Latin verb salire, meaning “to leap.”) A desultory conversation leaps from one topic to another, and a desultory comment is one that jumps away from the topic at hand. Meanwhile a desultory performance is one resulting from an implied lack of steady, focused effort.
wordsmithdaily_feedearthobservatory_iod_feed
The 50,000-year-old crater is relatively young, and only the second discovered in China.
susandennisurban_feedurban_feedsusandennis
merriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 2, 2025 is:
galumph • \guh-LUMF\ • verb
To galumph is to move in a loud and clumsy way.
// I could hear them galumphing around in the attic in search of old family photo albums.
Examples:
“Dragons! Dragons roaring! Dragons squawking! Dragons sizing each other up! Dragons galumphing over the sand so awkwardly it reminds you that dragons are creatures of the air, not the earth.” — Glen Weldon, NPR, 28 July 2024
Did you know?
Bump, thump, thud. There’s no doubt about it—when someone or something galumphs onto the scene, ears take notice. Galumph first lumbered onto the English scene in 1872 when Lewis Carroll used the word to describe the actions of the vanquisher of the Jabberwock in Through the Looking Glass: “He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back.” Carroll likely constructed the word by splicing gallop and triumphant, as galumph did in its earliest uses convey a sense of exultant bounding. Other 19th-century writers must have liked the sound of galumph, because they began plying it in their own prose, and it has been clumping around our language ever since.
wordsmithdaily_feedearthobservatory_iod_feed
The world’s oldest and largest known impact structure shows some of the most extreme deformation conditions known on Earth.
susandennissusandennis
used_songs
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therealljidol , but even if I get cut I would like to continue to do some creative writing each week.merriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 1, 2025 is:
verbose • \ver-BOHSS\ • adjective
Someone described as verbose tends to use many words to convey their point. Verbose can also describe something, such as a speech, that contains more words than necessary.
// The article documenting their meeting presented an odd exchange between a verbose questioner and a laconic interviewee.
Examples:
"The dense, verbose text—over which some actors stumbled, understandably, on opening night—created a dizzying journey through a war between gods and mortals fought across time and place." — Rosa Cartagena, The Philadelphia Daily News, 19 Feb. 2025
Did you know?
There's no shortage of words to describe wordiness in English. Diffuse, long-winded, prolix, redundant, windy, repetitive, rambling, and circumlocutory are some that come to mind. Want to express the opposite idea? Try succinct, concise, brief, short, summary, terse, compact, or compendious. Verbose, which falls solidly into the first camp of words, comes from the Latin adjective verbōsus, from verbum, meaning "word." Other descendants of verbum include verb, adverb, proverb, verbal, and verbicide ("the deliberate distortion of the sense of a word").
earthobservatory_iod_feed
Famously visible from space, ring-shaped Manicouagan Lake was filled at the dawn of the Space Age when Canada dammed a river to flood a Triassic-aged impact crater.
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