21. Aggrandize

Last week’s ranking: unranked

Meaning and usage

Trump’s presidential platform in 2016 could be rephrased as “Aggrandize America Again”. The verb “to aggrandize” is borrowed from the French agrandiss meaning “large, great.”

Why it is in the news

You Musk be kidding

Elon Musk has been mentioned in the blog series for nearly a month straight now. A letter to The Mercury News editor lambasted Musk as a hustler who “manipulates governments and creates cartels that aggrandize themselves… at the cost of public funds.” Musk, the angry pen writers, is the culmination of hyper-capitalism topped by rabid nationalism.

Musk wanting for people to return to work, not only in his Tesla factory, is no act of aggrandizement, in my assessment.

22. Transitive

Last week’s ranking: 21

Meaning and usage

I have spoken about “transitive” as a verb form frequently, so I will look at another definition transitivus. As an adjective, transitive means to be “of, relating to, or involving transition.”

Why it is in the news

A vulnerability in many applications

A few tech articles covered the discovery* that 70 percent of applications have vulnerabilities in their open-source libraries. “Transient dependencies” are the cause of this vulnerability to those shared sources of code (open libraries). “Transitive dependencies refers to situations where a library relies on code from other libraries,” explains Fahmida Y. Rashid of Decipher.

Should we be worried about this vulnerability? I do not know. According to Veracode (via Tech Republic), the fixes to this is easy to find and to implement.

(***If you cover a discovery, does it the discovery uncovered or undiscovered?)

23. Love

Last week’s ranking: 17

Meaning and usage

The origin for the English word for “love” comes from an assortment of ancient languages. He is it direct from Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Online Dictionary:

Why it is in the news

Love over Zoom

Online dating was taboo some years back. Now it is the most popular ways for US couples to connect. Zoom certainly is now an accepted platform for meetings of any kind, especially courtship.

24. Vanilla

Last week’s ranking: unranked

Meaning and usage

Vanilla is my favourite orchid with which to flavour my ice cream. I go completely crazy with my vanilla ice cream toppings: rainbow sprinkles. Ordinary, yes; you can say that my vanilla ice cream preference is vanilla.

Why it is in the news

The Thrilla for Vanilla

Vanilla market news make my newsfeed as lively as a Cold Stone Creamery parlor. Nothing about the coronavirus has any overt negative affect in the vanilla market (which strangely makes this entire segment rather vanilla; I am too accustomed to thinking Covid-19 is responsible for everything).

Vanilla markets are expected to have a 2-8 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2019-2024. This is a great thing for the labour-intensive industry (it takes two years to grow vanilla). The product is said to be one of the most expensive spices in the world.

Here is a home recipe for vanilla ice cream, allegedly without the need of an ice-cream maker and cream.

25. Preposition

Last week’s ranking: 23

Meaning and usage

A preposition is a function word that combines with a noun phrase to form a phrase which expresses a modification or predication, according to Merriam-Webster. I have no reason to doubt them on that.

Why it is in the news

Prepositions can change the meaning of entire sentences. An online essay brilliantly displayed this by describing how certain prepositions placed after the word “free”.

Free to do something; we are free to speak, to meet, to worship.

Free from something; most of us are free from religious oppression, from burdens, from war.