Today's Word "Quicksand"
Published in Vocabulary
quicksand \KWIK-saend\ (noun) - 1 : A bed of dense, sticky sand or mud that clings to objects that fall into it, making escape difficult; 2 : a situation in which attempts to escape only make matters worse.
"The contract negotiations turned into quicksand as, the more we talked, the worse our position became."
Today's word comes from Middle English quyksond "living sand," with quick in its original sense of "alive," as in the Sharon Stone-Russell Crowe movie, 'The Quick and the Dead.' It comes from a suffixed form (Old English cwicu "alive") of the Proto-Indo-European root *gwiwo-, which also converted to Sanskrit "jiva," Latin "vivus," Lithuanian "gyvas," Russian "zhiv," and, believe it or not, Greek bios "life." The noun "quick," which means sensitive flesh or tissue, as in "to cut something to the quick," derives from the original meaning of the adjective. Some interesting facts. Quicksand is seldom more than two or three feet deep, so the quicksand itself does not kill people unless they are alone and starve to death while stuck in it. You sink in quicksand only if you struggle; if you do not struggle, you will float on top of it.
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