Word of the Day!

exculpate [ek-skuhl-peyt, ik-skuhl-peyt]

verb:
to clear from a charge of guilt or fault; free from blame; vindicate

Examples:

He devises a daring, sometimes distracting but ultimately inspired format by saving his commentary for footnotes that contextualize, teasingly contradict and occasionally exculpate Rodgers from her unsparing self-assessments. (Charles McNulty, Stephen Sondheim and Mary Rodgers, late Broadway greats, have brilliant last words, Los Angeles Times, November 2022)

An amnesty could exculpate as many as 1,400 activists and politicians involved in the attempt to separate Catalonia from Spain. (Spanish Socialists and Catalan Junts reach deal for government support, amnesty, Reuters, November 2023)

In a perverse circular logic, the crime itself can come to seem like the clearest evidence of the condition that is held up to exculpate the mother - and also like its own form of punishment. (Eren Orbey, A Husband in the Aftermath of His Wife's Unfathomable Act, Reuters, October 2024)

Cato attacked him for this, and Lucilius ran the risk of losing his tribunate, and many of the friends of Pompeius came forward to exculpate him and said that he did not seek that office or wish for it. (Plutarch, Lives)

Origin:

'to clear from suspicion of wrong or guilt,' 1650s, from Medieval Latin exculpatus, past participle of exculpare, from Latin ex culpa, from ex 'out of' + culpa ablative of culpa 'blame, fault.' (Online Etymology Dictionary)

There's no need to say 'my bad' if you're unfamiliar with exculpate; while the word is far from rare, it is most often encountered in formal writing in reference to the clearing of someone of alleged fault or guilt, as in 'they were exculpated of any wrongdoing.' You may be more familiar with a pair of terms that, like exculpate, come from the Latin noun culpa, meaning 'blame' or 'guilt.' One is the adjective culpable, used to describe someone deserving of condemnation or blame. The other is the Latin phrase mea culpa, which translates directly as 'through my fault' and refers to an acknowledgement of personal fault or error that is more formal than, well, 'my bad.' (Merriam-Webster)

mangel-wurzel [mang-guhl-wur-zuhl]

noun:
(chiefly British) a variety of the beet Beta vulgaris, cultivated as food for livestock.

(click to enlarge)

The village's Punkie Night takes place on the last Thursday in October. Children carry "punkies" - lanterns traditionally made from a large turnip known as a mangel-wurzel - and stop at key locations to sing the Punkie Song. (Linda Serck, Halloween: England's strange and ancient winter rituals, BBC, October 2014)

Teams of three compete to see who can land their mangel-wurzel nearest a large, leafless one, called a 'Norman'. (So wurzel our mangels gone?, Express, October, 2012)

We feel inclined to embrace Mr Hardy, though we are not fond of him, in pure satisfaction with the good brown soil and substantial flesh and blood, the cows, and the mangel-wurzel, and the hard labour of the fields - which he makes us smell and see. (Joanne Wilkes (ed), Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Nineteenth Century)

He soon discovers that the melon has no more flavor than a mangel-wurzel, and that the apricot tastes like a turnip radish. (Charles James Lever, The Dodd Family Abroad)

She turned to Philip. "Athelny's always like this when we come down here. Country, I like that! Why, he don't know a swede from a mangel-wurzel." (Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage)

His mouth is open, too, and big enough apparently to hold a mangel-wurzel. ( Gordon Stables, The Cruise of the Land-Yacht 'Wanderer'; or, Thirteen Hundred Miles in my Caravan)

Origin:

Root vegetables aren't the most sexy things either to eat or write about but I hope to show that this one's an exception. Let's get a couple of important things right before we go any further - its name is usually written mangel-wurzel and it isn't a relative of the turnip but a large variety of beet, closely related to the sugar beet and the beetroot or red beet.

Mind you, many people have been confused about it down the years. These root vegetables all look alike to the non-specialist and we don't even all have the same names for them. The British swede is the rutabaga in the US, for example, the latter name having been taken from an old dialect Swedish word for this type of turnip. (Brits call it a swede because it was bred in Sweden in the eighteenth century; the Scots name for it is neep, as in bashed neeps, or mashed turnips, a traditional accompaniment to the famous haggis). But when H L Mencken wrote in The American Language in 1921 that Englishmen 'still call the rutabaga a mangelwurzel', he was seriously up the botanical and agricultural creek without a leg to stand on.

Mangel-wurzel is mainly a British term, which is often shortened to mangel, or sometimes to mangold. To many townies, it evokes a stereotyped traditional yokel rurality in which every peasant wears a smock, wields a pitchfork, and talks in a Mummerset accent. Think of the scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, whose first name comes from the vegetable, though the author states that his head was actually made from a turnip. Confusion abounds.

Mangel-wurzel is originally German. The first part is the old word Mangold, meaning beet or chard (the latter being the green leaves from a variety of beet). The second part is Wurzel, a root. Germans became confused about the first part several centuries ago and thought it was instead Mangel, a shortage or lack. From this has grown up the popular belief that mangel-wurzel refers to a famine food, a root you eat only when you're starving. This is a gross calumny, since when young it's as tasty and sweet as other sorts of beet, though it's mainly used as animal fodder. (World Wide Words)

bagatelle [bag-uh-tel]

noun:
1 something of little value or importance; a trifle
2 a game played on a board having holes at one end into which balls are to be struck with a cue
3 a short literary or musical piece in light style

Examples:

If anything, the slowly accumulating final chord of the bagatelle could have set up the softly arpeggiated one at the start of 'Twilight Way', the first of the 'Poetic Tone Pictures.' (Joshua Barone, Review: Dvorak’s 'Poetic Tone Pictures’ Makes Its Carnegie Debut, New York Times, February 2023)

Pinball got its start in 18th-century France with the billiardslike tabletop game bagatelle, which used a springlike launcher. (World-ranked pinball wizard is reviving the game in San Antonio with a new startup, san Antonio Express-News, March 2020)

When you are caught in a web of conspiracies, the best of deeds becomes a mere bagatelle, as we find in the fall of Udensi. (Henry Akubuiro, Travails of a Good Samaritan , The Sun Nigeria, March 2021)

Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. (Jim Holt, Say Anything, The New Yorker, August 2005)

'Overdue; was the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would not be more than sixty thousand words - a bagatelle for him with his splendid vigor of production. (Jack London, Martin Eden)

The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. (Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love)

Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ - all gone, and jewels, too. (Virginia Woolf, 'The Mark on the Wall')

Origin:

1630s, 'a trifle, thing of no importance,' from French bagatelle 'knick-knack, bauble, trinket' (16c.), from Italian bagatella 'a trifle,' which is perhaps a diminutive of Latin baca 'berry,' or from one of the continental words (such as Old French bague 'bundle') from the same source as English bag. As 'a piece of light music,' it is attested from 1827. (Online Etymology Dictionary)