Cinereous

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Dr. Goodword
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Cinereous

Postby Dr. Goodword » Wed Jun 03, 2020 7:01 pm

• cinereous •


Pronunciation: sê-nir-i-ês • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: 1. Like ashes, especially in color, ashen, gray, salt-and-pepper (hair, feathers). 2. Otherwise like ashes, such as food cooked to a crisp.

Notes: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, cinereous occurs fewer than .01 times per million words, yet it belongs to a large lexical family. This family includes two synonyms, cinereal and cineraceous, plus another adjective with a similar meaning, cinerary "related to ashes", as 'a cinerary urn'.

In Play: Cinereous is most often used to describe feathers: "Harold was happy to see a cinereous vulture carry away his dog that had died only recently." However, it almost as often is used to refer to the color of hair: "She had hardly changed at all since he last saw her 20 years ago. Only her hair had changed from brunet to a rather fetching cinereous color."

Word History: Today's Good Word is an only slightly modified copy of Latin cinereus "ashen", the adjective for cinis, cineris "ashes". Latin inherited this word from PIE word keni-/koni- "dust, ashes", source also of Greek konis "dust". This word also underlies Latin incinerare "burn to ashes", the past participle of which, incineratus, went into the making of English incinerate. In English it ended up as cinder, apparently borrowed from French cendre "ashes", a descendant of the same Latin ceneris. These are the only reliable traces of the PIE word found in modern Indo-European languages. (Newcomer Mark Schultz found this word and shared it with us; we should all be thankful.)
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Slava
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Re: Cinereous

Postby Slava » Thu Jul 08, 2021 4:53 pm

And, of course, related to Cendrillon, aka Cinderella. Золушка (Zolushka) in Russian.
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Re: Cinereous

Postby Philip Hudson » Thu Jul 15, 2021 9:44 pm

Ceniza AKA purple sage is so named for the smoky green color of its leaves. It is a plant native to south Texas. Its flowers are a smoky purple and they are apt to bloom almost any time except in the dead of winter. The Purple Sage Honky-tonk in the Texas county of my youth was smoke filled.
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David Myer
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Re: Cinereous

Postby David Myer » Mon Jul 19, 2021 6:00 am

And is it widely used in cooking Philip? What does it taste like - apart from smokey? Is it a true sage?


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