apodictic - Word of the Day - 1/11/17

apodictic

adjective

Pronunciation

 ap-uh-DIK-tik

Definition

: expressing or of the nature of necessary truth or absolute certainty

Examples

"On the humbler level of recorded evidence, what is one to make of a thinker-scholar who ruled with apodictic, magisterial certainty that 'Shakespeare's tragedies are second-class with the exception of Lear'?" — George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement, 4 June 1993

"Her writing, collected in a volume titled Sweet Nothings (a title intended, one suspects, to ward off serious criticism), has an apodictic, take-it-or-leave-it quality: 'Art is a low-risk, high-reward crime.'" — Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Winter 2016

Did You Know?

Apodictic is a word for those who are confident about that of which they speak. It's a handy word that can describe a conclusive concept, a conclusive person, or even that conclusive person's conclusive remarks. A well-known close relative of apodictic is paradigm ("an outstandingly clear or typical example"); both words are built on Greek deiknynai, meaning "to show." More distant relatives (from Latin dicere, a relative of deiknynai that means "to say") include diction, dictate, edict, and predict.

Word  Quiz

Unscramble the letters to create an adjective derived from Latin dicere that means "truthful" or "genuine": ICDLAIVRE.

Merriam-Webster


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