supercilious

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The Word of the Day for December 8 is:=20

supercilious   \soo-per-SILL-ee-us\   adjective
          : coolly and patronizingly haughty=20

Example sentence:
          Lucinda's beauty attracted many suitors, but her supercilious =
manner eventually drove them all away.

Did you know?
     Arrogant and disdainful types tend to raise an eyebrow at anything =
they consider beneath them. The original supercilious crowd must have sh=
own that raised-eyebrow look often, because the adjective "supercilious"=
 derives from "supercilium," Latin for "eyebrow." (We plucked our adject=
ive and its meaning from the Latin adjective "superciliosus.") "Supercil=
ious" has been used to describe the censoriously overbearing since the l=
ate 1600s, but there was a time in the 1700s when it was also used as a =
synonym of another "supercilium" descendent, "superciliary" ("of, relati=
ng to, or adjoining the eyebrow"). Although the eyebrow sense of "superc=
ilious" is now obsolete, it does help explain what ornithologist John La=
tham meant in 1782 when he described a "Supercilious K[ingfisher]" with =
a narrow orange stripe over its eyes.





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