Today's Word "Pervious"
Published in Vocabulary
pervious \PER-vi-ehs\ (adjective) - 1 : Permeable, penetrable, allowing passage through itself; 2 : susceptible to reason, approachable, can be reasoned with.
"Pamela is a pervious supervisor; approach her calmly and rationally and she'll listen to you."
From Latin "pervius" based on per- "through" + via "way; road." "Via," now used as a preposition in English (e.g. via air mail), comes from an interesting family referring to motion that includes "weigh," "away," "wagon," "wiggle," and "trivial." "Weigh" comes from Old English wegan "to carry, balance in a scale," which also gave us "wagon." English "way" and German Weg "way" are also descendants of the same ancestor. "Wiggle," "wag," and "waggle," too, refer to kinds of motion, and all descend from the same root. "Trivial" is the adjective of trivium (tri+vi[a]+um) "the three ways," originally referring to the lower division (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) of the seven arts in medieval universities, the higher division comprising arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
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