Today's Word "Quiddity"
Published in Vocabulary
quiddity \KWI-deh-ti\ (noun) - 1 : The essential nature of a thing, its character; 2 : a trivial issue, a quibble.
"Can we get past the quiddities and down to the quiddities of the issue?"
Today's word comes from Medieval Latin "quidditas" based on quid "what," as in quid pro quo "something for something" and a recent word in our series, "quidnunc." We have mentioned before that the interrogative pronouns of all Indo-European languages come from the same root, *kwo-, which loses its [k] sound in some languages and its [w] sound in others. The sound [k] became [h] in English, so "what," "where," and "who" all come from this source is Russian chto "what," kto "who," and kuda "where to." Latin maintained both initial sounds, spelling them [qu]: qui [kwi] "who, what." The dative-ablative plural of this pronoun is quibus "to/from what," which we find in "quibble."
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