More Words for Today

glabrous \GLAY-bruhs\, adjective:
Smooth; having a surface without hairs, projections, or any unevenness.

How much more powerful then will be the effect -- next week? next month? soon enough -- when Gore, resplendent, clean-shaven, glabrous in his glory, returns from the dead! Radiant! Reborn!
--Lance Morrow, "Al Gore, and Other Famous Bearded Men," Time, August 16, 2001

We offered to the rebarbative Senator Patrick Leahy's demands on us amused resistance and the promise to buy the glabrous old boy a proper hairpiece.
--R Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., "Jumpin' Jim Jehoshaphat!" The American Spectator, July 1, 2001

Glabrous is from Latin glaber, "smooth, bald."


irrupt \ih-RUHPT\, intransitive verb:
1. To burst in forcibly or suddenly; to intrude.
2. (Ecology) To increase rapidly in number.

Furthermore, and most decisively, the 1848 revolutions had shown how the masses could irrupt into the closed circle of their rulers, and the progress of industrial society itself made their pressure constantly greater even in non-revolutionary periods.
--The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 by Eric J. Hobsbawm

What happens in these flashes of inspiration is a kind of transcendence in science in which a new concept, something that has never been dreamt or thought of before, irrupts into the scientist's imagination.
--Roy Bhaskar, Reflections on Meta-Reality

What sounds are these that sting as they caress, that irrupt into my soul and twine about my heart?
--Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

Archetypes are primordial forces, hidden within the collective unconscious, which normally lie dormant and unnoticed but which can suddenly irrupt into the conscious mind and produce the most unexpected results.
--Dewi Rees, Death and Bereavement

But unlike the populations of some of their more famous relatives (more famous to ecologists, at least), whose population fluctuations follow a regular, three-year cycle, some meadow vole populations irrupt sporadically and others almost always stay high or low.
--Richard S. Ostfeld, "Little loggers make a big difference," Natural History, May 2002

Irrupt is derived from the past participle of Latin irrumpere, from ir-, in-, "in" + rumpere, "to break."


agrestic \uh-GRES-tik\, adjective:
Pertaining to fields or the country; rural; rustic.

The funniest and most agrestic of all his paintings were, undoubtedly, the cows.
--Robert Hughes, "An Outlaw Who Loved Laws," Time, July 26, 1993

Grass plants possess an agrestic simplicity that probably connects them, at sorne level of mind, with wholesome grain and the restorative country life.
--George Schen, The Complete Shade Gardener

Agrestic is from agrestis, from ager, "field." It is related to agriculture.