Word of the week F block

 (n) A sport popular in Russia where you alternate rounds of boxing and chess until you lose. Or something that’s a strange combination. I was reading a book about emergent technologies, and in its introduction the authors explained why flying cars aren’t common as of now. “Yes, time travelers from the year 1920, we have flying cars. No, nobody wants them. They’re the chessboxing of vehicles - amusing to see once in a while, but most of the time you’d rather the two parts separate,” (Weinersmith 2). I chose this word because it's very funny, but actually could easily be used. Unlike a lot of other strange words, this one isn't just about some very specific topic, but rather a concept that's quite common: People combining things that should never have been combined. As a side note, apparently underwater hockey is also a thing

  Quintessentially adv used to emphasize the most perfect or typical example of a quality or class. One of the most celebrated poets in America, Robert Frost was an author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes and a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.-Article on Robert Frost  I chose this word because I know that I have used it before and so have other people I know but I never knew what it actually meant and if I was using it correctly.

 Somnambulatory - adj - (figurative) going through the motions "... whereupon Mr. Wolfsheim swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction" (The Great Gatsby pg 69) I chose this word for the week because I liked the way that it sounded and I found it interesting that such a long word had such a simple meaning. 

Perfidy (n) - deceitfulness; untrustworthiness. Example: “If they are directly authorized by the Cabinet, then we may calculate upon a scene of violence co-extensive with British power, and for another display of that perfidy so characteristic of its government.” (Debates over War of 1812) As I was reviewing sources for my history essay, I came across this word, perfidy. I've never seen this word so I looked it up. I like the word perfidy because it just sounds unique and I like saying it. I also didn't know it was a word used back in the 19th century. 

 N) The tyrant or referring to him in Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”. Or referring to the decay after his death. Another name for Ramses II.  I actually found this word in another book, called We Have No Idea. It’s about physics, and has a chapter talking about the size and complexity of the universe. It’s quite interesting, because at the moment we may be living in the era where the universe is the most complex. When the Big Bang happened, everything was a mostly uniform soup of energy, quarks, and things like that. Afterward inflation quickly amplified tiny variations. When atoms formed all of the charges in the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces were neutralised. Gravity is much weaker than any of these others, but it cannot be neutralised, and eventually clumped things into balls of gas that formed stars and planets. These clumped together into galaxies, which clustered into superclusters, which clustered into this odd network of planes and filaments. After which there ...

  Stymie (Verb) prevent or hinder the progress of “Congressional leaders said Thursday that a coronavirus aid was within reach, but that the lawmakers would have to resolve the sticking points that have stymied them for months” ( The Wall Street Journal article) I chose to include this word in the blog for this week because when I came across the word in a news article, I did not comprehend what the sentence meant. Before looking up the word’s meaning I thought the sentence was conveying that the lawmakers were confused or perplexed by the ‘sticking points’ mentioned in the sentence. When I learned the word ‘stymie’ means to prevent something, the article made more sense and correlated with all the other information in the article.