Compendious

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Dr. Goodword
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Compendious

Postby Dr. Goodword » Tue Jun 10, 2014 10:40 pm

• compendious •

Pronunciation: kêm-pen-di-ês • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: Comprehensive but succinct or brief.

Notes: Today's Good Word is the adjective accompanying the noun compendium "condensation of larger work, a digest". Of course it comes with an adverb, compendiously. There is also an abstract noun denoting the quality implied by today's word, compendiousness "comprehensiveness with brevity".

In Play: The basic sense of this word is "comprehensive but concise": "Miles Overland's narrative to the slide show of his trip to Canada was not as compendious as it might have been; consequently, most of us napped through it." However, in usage this word has drifted away from its sense of "comprehensive" and toward the sense of "brief": "Hooker Crooke gave a much too compendious report on his dealings with the bank, leaving many questions unanswered."

Word History: Today's Good Word is based on Late Latin compendiosus, the adjective derived from Latin compendium "a shortening, a saving or gain". This word was derived from compendere "to weigh together", made up of com- "(together) with" + pendere "to weigh, hang". Latin got this word from Proto-Indo-European (s)pen- "draw, stretch, spin" with a Fickle S (sometimes there, sometimes not). In the Germanic languages like English, the S was generally preserved in such words as spin, from the time when spinning was done using a spindle hanging from one hand. But in Latin the S was generally lost, as we see in the English borrowings like pendulum, pendant and pansy. Pansy?! Yes, the figurative sense of weigh "to consider, think about" runs throughout Indo-European languages, and pansy is the English version of French pensée "thought, remembrance", a name in a semantic class with forget-me-not. (Let's keep our thank-you to Kathleen McCune—now of Sweden—compendious, for 'tis she who recommended it for today's Good Word.)
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Slava
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Re: Compendious

Postby Slava » Fri Jun 27, 2014 12:26 pm

Oddly, I have always taken this word as "large or weighty," as in a compendious tome. I guess I was wrong all along.
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Re: Compendious

Postby Perry Lassiter » Fri Jun 27, 2014 3:56 pm

The word SOUNDS weighty, like "comprehensive." I'd probably say an abstract, or a precis.
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