It's Merriam-Webster's word of the day for April 8th.

Today's word is fatuous, spelled F-A-T-U-N-G-E-N-G-N-G-N-G-A-T-U-O-S.

fatuous is an adjective.

To describe something such as an idea or remark as fatuous is to say that it is foolish or silly rather than sensible or

logical.

Here's the word used in a sentence from father and son, a memoir by Jonathan Rebonne.

When I was first admitted to the emergency room at Swedish's hospital in Edmonds, a doctor

asked me whether I was right or left-handed, and when I said left, he said,

That's lucky, a remark I took to be verging on the fatuous.

But since then I've read that a considerable portion of left-handed people have their verbal and cognitive facilities located in the right hemisphere of the brain, which would explain my relative ease in talking, thinking, and remembering despite my hemiplegia.

John Dunn, the poet, wrote, I am two fools I know for loving and for saying so in whining poetry. It was simultaneously

confessing to both infatuation and fatuousness. As any love-struck fool can attest, infatuation can make buffoons of the best of us,

and so it is reasonable that the words fatuous and infatuation

share the same Latin root, fatuus, meaning foolish.

Both terms have been part of English since the 17th century,

though infatuation followed the earlier verb infatuate,

a fatuus descendant that once meant to make foolish,

but that now usually means to inspire with a foolish love or admiration.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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