• malign •
Pronunciation: mê-lain • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb, adjective
Meaning: To vilify, defame, make harmful, pernicious and, most often, false statements about someone.
Notes: Today's word has a spelling hitch about it: the [ai] sound is spelt IG, as in align. Look out for it. This word may be used as an adjective, as in 'a malign influence' though, if you feel better with a suffix, malignant ([mê-lig-nênt] is available, too. Someone who maligns is a maligner and the adverb is either malignly or malignantly.
In Play: This word is hard to play with: "At the end of his speech, Phil Phillips maligned a position he had recently supported." The adjectival use of this word might be heard in sentences like this: "Ben Dover was critical of Phil Anders's womanizing without using malign words so that he would not have to bear the brunt of similar criticism."
Word History: The reason for the odd spelling of today's Good Word is that we took it from Old French maligne "evil", which French inherited from its grandfather, Latin, malignus "wicked, evil". Latin created this word from male "badly" + -gnus "born", from PIE mel- "false, bad, wrong" and gen-/gon- "give birth to, beget". Mel- turns up in Greek meleos "wretched, miserable", Armenian meghk "sin", Welsh mall "corrupt, evil", Lithuanian melas "a lie", and Latvian maldināt "to deceive". We find evidence of gen-/gon- in Sanskrit janati "generates, gives birth to", Greek genesis "origin, source" and gyne "woman", Latin genus "kind, family, birth, origin", Welsh geni "to be born", Breton genel "generate, give birth to", Lithuanian gentis "tribe", Latvian ǵints "tribe", Czech, Russian, Serbian žena "woman", Dutch kind "child", German Kind "child", and English kin and kind.
