Words of the Day

ob‧nox‧ious /əbˈnɒkʃəs $ -ˈnɑːk-/ adjective  

very offensive, unpleasant, or rude

1580s, "subject to the authority of another," from Latin obnoxiosus "hurtful, injurious," from obnoxius "subject, exposed to harm," from ob "to, toward" (see ob-) + noxa "injury, hurt, damage entailing liability" (see noxious). Meaning "subject to something harmful" is 1590s; meaning "offensive, hateful" is first recorded 1670s, influenced by noxious.

Examples:

- True, when forced to come out into the light a little,
people like Lloyd Blankfein proved to be jaw-droppingly
obnoxious douchebags who made you want to drive a fist through
your TV set. (Taibbi - Griftopia)

- Perpetua, slightly senior and therefore thinking she is in charge of me, was at her most obnoxious and
bossy, going on and on to the point of utter boredom about latest half-million-pound property she is planning to buy with her rich-but-overbred boyfriend, Hugo: 'Yars, yars, well it is north-facing but they've done something frightfully clever with the light.' (Fielding - Bridget Jones)

=oval, egg-shaped

"thick-skinned animal" (typically, an elephant)

/ˈpækɪdɜːm $ -dɜːrm/

'derm' as in pHisoderm

- A competing Tammany Hall exhibit several doors down boasted a live elephant—representing Republicans eating the city—but it looked to Bell like the anti-Tammany show was outdrawing the pachyderm four-to-one. (Clive Cussler and Justin Scott - The Gangster)

- Even the most stubborn pachyderm can be motivated when asked to consider the worst-case scenarios of not completing an estate plan. (Maurer - Simple Money)

fear of loud sounds

/sᵻˈfɒlədʒi/ (from Greek psephos ψῆφος, 'pebble', as the Greeks used pebbles as ballots) is a branch of political science which deals with the study and scientific analysis of elections

- He delighted in vague concepts, things that could be made specific in several ways, but were often better left
vague. He worked in many fields including: astronomy, cryptography, psephology, information retrieval, engineering, computing, education,
psychology, chemistry, pollution control, and economics. John Tukey was firmly associated with Princeton and Bell Labs. (From a book about statistics)

punc‧til‧i‧ous /pʌŋkˈtɪliəs/ adjective formal  

very careful to behave correctly and follow rules

'spark, glimmer' (related to 'shine'), especially in

"There is not a scintilla of evidence"

"to make the most outlandish and destructive claims without providing a scintilla of evidence to support them" - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/03/04/trump-accuses-obama-of-nixonwatergate-plot-to-wire-tap-trump-tower/

Etymology (from etymonline.com):

also tabu, 1777 (in Cook's "A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean"), "consecrated, inviolable, forbidden, unclean or cursed," explained in some English sources as being from Tongan (Polynesian language of the island of Tonga) ta-bu "sacred," from ta "mark" + bu "especially." But this may be folk etymology, as linguists in the Pacific have reconstructed an irreducable Proto-Polynesian *tapu, from Proto-Oceanic *tabu "sacred, forbidden" (compare Hawaiian kapu "taboo, prohibition, sacred, holy, consecrated;" Tahitian tapu "restriction, sacred, devoted; an oath;" Maori tapu "be under ritual restriction, prohibited"). The noun and verb are English innovations first recorded in Cook's book.

Nothing to do with 'tuna'!, a kind of tree. Maybe the English word comes from Chinese?

Also spelled 'toon', 'tun'.