PERTINACIOUS

[Dr. Goodword]

• pertinacious •

Pronunciation: pêrt-n-ay-shês • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: Tenaciously persistent, unrelenting, stubbornly unyielding in a way that might be taken as annoyingly rigid.

Notes: Pertinacious is surrounded by a lovely family of lexical relatives. The adverb is the perfectly normal pertinaciously while the abstract noun is pertinacity. The pronunciation is a little odd in that the vowel in the root, -tin-, completely vanishes in US English and the consonant [n] becomes a vowel. (Listen to Pronunciation.)

In Play: Pertinacity is an unremitting tenacity that some find annoying: "Gladys Friday shied away from Phil Anders in favor of the less pertinacious advances she received from Jessie Noff." Pertinacity, however, can be viewed in a negative or positive light, depending on how we view the position of the pertinacious person: "Lacey Shortz pertinaciously supported the idea of curtains on the office windows until the boss finally gave in and bought them."

Word History: This word is a modified version of Latin pertinax (pertinac-s) "steadfast, tenacious", which is composed of per- "through(out), intensely" + tenax (tenac-s) "tenacious". Tenax is based on a very popular root among Indo-European languages: ten-. We borrowed most of our words with this root from French, which maintained ten- in words like tenant, but also changed it to tin- and -tain in such words as continue, detain, and retain. Lieutenant, by the way, is another member of this family. Its original meaning was "substitute" or "place holder" from lieu "place" + tenir "to hold, keep" + -ant. Why Britons pronounce this word [lef-tenênt] is a mystery, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Scots were somehow involved. (William Hupy did not have to be pertinacious at all to convince us that we should run today's Good Word.)

[Slava]

Meaning: Tenaciously persistent, unrelenting, stubbornly unyielding in a way that might be taken as annoyingly rigid.

I don't know if the date was planned, but it worked out well. February 23 is Defender of the Fatherland Day in Russia. It used to be called Soviet Army Day. I'm sure there have been several foes of Russia and the USSR who found the country's defenders annoyingly rigid, tenaciously persistent, unrelenting, and stubbornly unyielding.

I was going to write SU, but as I have a degree from NY's SU (Syracuse University), I felt I should avoid the connection.