Today's Word "Blandiloquent"
Published in Vocabulary
blandiloquent \blaen-DI-leh-qwehnt/ (adjective) - Smooth-talking, honey-tongued; flattering.
"Some blandiloquent used-car salesman convinced Tony's Great-Aunt Mathilda to buy a 2001 Honda with 300,000 miles on it."
Today's is another case of lexical larceny by Mother English, this time of Latin blandiloquentia "smooth-talking," a compound composed of blandus "soft" + loquor "to talk," whose verbal noun is loquentia "talking, talk." Oddly enough, the PIE root underlying bland- is *mol- "soft" (cf. Italian molle "soft") in the usual three ablaut flavors, including *mel- and *ml-. The word-initial combination [ml] sometimes became [bl] in Latin and Greek, hence Latin "blandus" with a suffix nd. In Greek we find malakos "soft," in Serbian, mlad "young," and in Russian molodoy "young." English inherited this root through the Germanic languages as "melt" and "mild."
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