The Word of the Day

expiate \EK-spee-ayt\ verb, transitive
1 : to extinguish the guilt incurred by
*2 : to make amends for
intransitive : to make expiation

Example sentence: "It seemed to me that I was hurried on by an inevitable and unseen fate to this day of misery, and that now I was to expiate all my offences at the gallows...." (Daniel Defoe, _Moll Flanders_)

Did you know? "Disaster shall fall upon you, which you will not be able to expiate." That ominous biblical prophecy (_Isaiah_ 47:11 RSV) shows that "expiate" was once involved in confronting the forces of evil as well as in assuaging guilt. The word derives from "expiare," Latin for "to atone for," a root that in turn traces to the Latin term for "pious." "Expiate" originally referred to warding off evil by using sacred rites, or to using sacred rites to cleanse or purify something. By the 17th century, Shakespeare (and others) were using it to mean "to put an end to": "But when in thee time's furrows I behold, / Then look I death my days should expiate" ("Sonnet 22"). Those senses have since become obsolete, and now only the "extinguish the guilt" and "make amends" senses remain in use.

travesty \TRAV-uh-stee\ noun
1 : a burlesque translation or literary or artistic imitation usually grotesquely incongruous in style, treatment, or subject matter
*2 : a debased, distorted, or grossly inferior imitation

Example sentence: The new movie is a travesty of a documentary, likely to appeal only to the lowest sense of humor.

Did you know? "Travesty," which first appeared in print in English as a noun in 1674, comes from the French verb "travestir," meaning "to disguise." The word's roots, however, wind back through Italian to Latin. That ancient tongue includes the verb "vestire," a verb meaning "to clothe" or "to dress." "Vestire" is the ancestor of "travesty" and a number of other English words, including "transvestite," "divest," and "investiture." "Travesty," incidentally, can also be a verb meaning "to make a travesty of" or "to parody"; the verb predates the noun in English by a single year.