It's the Word of the Day for November 21st.

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Today's word is tenacious, spelled TENA-C-I-O-U-S. Tenacious is an adjective. Something described as

Tenacious cannot easily be stopped or pulled apart. In other words, it is firm or

strong. Tenacious can also describe something such as a myth that continues or persists for a long time,

or someone who is determined to do something. Here's the word used in a sentence from the

backyard bird chronicles by Amy Tan. I put up a nesting box three years ago

and nailed it to an oak tree. Beth and Fiona told me the next box location was ideal, seven feet up,

out of view of walkways, and within three feet of the lower branches of a tenacious old fuchsia tree.

For the more than 400 years that the word tenacious has been a part of the English language,

it has adhered closely to its Latin antecedent, tenacs, an adjective meaning holding fast,

clinging, or persistent. Almost from the first, tenacious could suggest either literal adhesion or figurative stick-to-itiveness.

Sandburrs are tenacious, and so are athletes who don't let defeat get them down.

We use tenacious of a good memory, too, one that has a better than average capacity to hold

information. But you can also have too much of a good thing. The addition in Latin of the prefix

pair, P-E-R, meaning thoroughly to tenax, led to the English word pertinacious, meaning perversely persistent.

You might use pertinacious for the likes of rumors and spam calls, for example.

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

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