It's January 2026, and my apologies for not posting recently. Lots of writing and family travel. In the meanwhile 2026 has brought with it oh so many new aspects of the "flood the zone" strategy employed by the current US administration. There are enough political blogs, commenters and posters in the world already, so we won't be going political here. However, I love words and their meaning and history, so I thought perhaps exploring two in particular might merit some special attention at the present time. 

1. Disgrace

Let's start with the Merriam Webster definition: transitive verb: "to be a source of shame to", "to cause to lose favor." 

I thought of the word roots, "dis-" and "grace," and it seemed to me the origins could have something to do with the idea of being distant from, or severed from, God. Sure enough, looking up the etymology, in late 12th century literature, there is the mention of grace as "God's unmerited favor, love or help," and adding the prefix "dis-" (opposite) would indicated a negation or separation from that favor. Weirdly enough, the word "grace" had a use in the church when translated from the Greek word kharisma. Another 16th century definition of disgrace is: "disfigure, deprive of grace, put out of favor, dismiss with discredit." So, for my first word of the year, disgrace seems to be a rather timely one. 

2. Depraved

A number of words have been bandied about, all descriptive and articulate, some of which include vulgarity, degradation, corruption, abomination, obscene, perverse and abhorrent, But, fun as they are, none seem to quite hit the mark. Then I thought of legal terminology, and there we hit on it: depraved. Definition: "marked by corruption or evil," "having or showing an evil and immoral character." But just as I suspected, the legal definition was better: "characterized by extreme cruelty and immorality, often demonstrated  through violence." So, depraved gets my vote for most articulate word of the moment. At least here in the US.