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Today's Word "Celibate"
"He'd been celibate too many months. Celibate, not because he'd been on pilgrimage or fasting, no such nonsense — he'd leave that to the monks — but celibate out of convenience and squeamishness. Traveling with his daughter made dalliance difficult." -- Brenda Rickman Vantrease, 'The Illuminator'
There is no question about the original meaning of today's word because of its origin: Latin "caelibatus" from caelebs "unmarried." The Latin word is a mystery but might have come from an old root *kai "alone" combined with the same root underlying English "live" and German leben "live." If so, today's word would have originated in a compound meaning "alone-living." Since we don't find the second root elsewhere in Latin, it could have died out early, forcing the compound to become a single noun, or the compound might have been borrowed from a Germanic language in the first place. The root *kai also developed into Latvian kails "naked, bare" and Sanskrit kevala "alone, exclusive, only."
This news arrived on: 09/15/2005
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Posted Comments:
09-19-2008 06:16
ramakrishnan dorai wrote:
meaning od celibate
the meaning of the word celibate as "sexually abstinent" is more appropriate as compared to the first meaning given.
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