Today's Word "Genuflection"
Published in Vocabulary
genuflection \jen-yeh-FLEK-shehn\ (noun) - 1 : Bowing on one knee as a sign of respect; 2 : kow-towing, groveling.
"Rathbone's genuflection around the president in the board room gets on everyone's nerves."
Today's word comes from Late Latin genuflectere "to bow" based on genu "knee" + flectere "to bend." The latter stem is related to our word "flexible." The origin of "genu" is a Proto-Indo-European word that had three forms: *genu-, *gonu- and *gnu- (known as ablaut forms). Latin obviously used the first. Greek chose the second for its gonia "angle, corner" found in "diagonal," "orthogonal," and many others referring to angles or corners. English chose the third form, which came into Old English as cneo "knee" and today is spelled "knee" without the [k] sound, lost long ago in the fog of history
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