Word of the Day!

kitty-corner, catty-corner [kit-ee-kawr-ner, kat-ee-kawr-ner ]

adverb or adjective:
in a diagonal position from, especially outward from the corner of a square.

Examples:

A McDonald's is kitty-corner from a Walmart, and Tim Hortons is across the street from AAA. Convenient as it all may sound, this district is not quite real. (Katherine LaGrave, The Evolution of Miniature 'Safety Towns' for Kids, Bloomberg, June 2019)

The restaurant, which was built with an indoor and outdoor bar, sits kitty-corner to the school grounds. (Asher Price, Torchy's Tacos seeks alcohol waiver at South Congress spot, Axios, September 2024)

The next year began my transformation. I began to write about the High Line Canal, which was catty-corner to my apartment. (Loren M Hansen, Commentary: Becoming a bike advocate and how Streetsblog Denver helped me find community, Streetsblog Denver, January 2022)

I typically sit on the edge before pivoting 90 degrees and swinging my legs up, but then I'm still obliged to scooch - in kitty-corner fashion, as though my butt is a knight in a giant game of couch chess. (Nicole Shein, Are Sofas with Chaises Out of Style, or Here to Stay?, bob vila, July 2022)

Nancy had dropped my arm and was gliding kitty-corner fashion, across the floor. (Harold MacGrath, The Man on the Box)

Lieutenant Bill McDonald volunteered to lead a squad and break into a small house, just across a narrow little street and kitty-corner to the right. (Edwin L Sabin, With Sam Houston in Texas)

The grocery store is kitty corner from the coffee shop. Using my little makeshift diagram below, the blue cat is kitty corner from the orange tabby (and vice versa). (Michael Kwan, Idiomatica: Why Kitty Corner?, beyond the rhetoric, August 2018)

(click to enlarge)

'diagonally opposite,' 1838, earlier cater-cornered (1835, American English), from now-obsolete cater 'to set, cut, or move diagonally' (1570s), from French catre 'four,' from Latin quattuor (from PIE root kwetwer- 'four'). (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Though peaked ears and spanned whiskers may be suggested by every variant, whether what is diagonal or oblique to or from something else is considered kitty-corner (or kitty-cornered), catty-corner (or catty-cornered), or catercorner (or catercornered), these seemingly feline-inspired directional words have nothing to do with cats. Instead they are yet more evidence of the English language's canoodling with French.

In the French of the 14th-16th centuries, quatre, the word for 'four,' could also be spelled catre. English speakers said 'ooh, that's handy' and snapped the term right up, but very sensibly (we think) spelled it cater. They already had a perfectly good word for 'four,' of course (it being four), but they liked that cater word for playing games and used it to refer to the four of cards or dice.

The four spots on dice, or four symbols on cards, can be seen as making an X, and it's suspected that this is how cater came to develop extended senses of 'diagonal' or 'diagonally.' English then made cater into a verb meaning 'to place, move, or cut (across) diagonally,' as in 'cater the pieces on the board,' but that never grew beyond some dialectal use. Also largely destined to flourish in dialects were a number of compound words that used cater to mean 'diagonal' or 'askew,' such as catabias and catawampus. Catercornered (and later catercorner) caught on more broadly. Eventually the dice and cards were forgotten and that first syllable settled very cat-like into a sunny spot in the lexicon and spread itself out: catty-corner and kitty-corner (and their -ed variants) were the inevitable outcome. (Merriam-Webster)

Kafkaesque [kahf-kuh-esk]

adjective:
1 of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings
2 having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality


Examples:

And yet to choose the right one, shoppers must navigate a Kafkaesque maze. (Steven Kurutz, Mattress shopping can be confusing, Herald-Tribune, October 2014)

In fact, to survive in this system, one has to be an expert in camouflaging and hiding from the system. So, let’s dive deeper into this Kafkaesque process, in which the aim is not to learn how to avoid bureaucracy but how people manage to get bureaucracy done. (Amna Hashmi, The rise of bureaucratic cartels, The Express Tribune, June 2024)

For some reason this has less a distancing effect than one of increased intimacy. It's one of the rules of his Kafkaesque game of alienation with the reader; almost as if he's daring us to become involved, or to resist becoming involved. (M John Harrison, Posthumous Stories by David Rose - review, The Guardian, December 2013)

Even at their most whimsical, in some ways, the film's magical realist touches aren't far off from the reality of the US immigration system, where Kafkaesque absurdities abound. (Catherine E Shoichet, This veteran actor plays an immigration lawyer in a new movie. In real life he's fighting his own case, CNN, March 2024)

It is a Kafkaesque, sealed universe in which nothing is, as it appears to be. (Sam Vaknin, After the Rain)

Origin:

1947, resembling such situations as are explored in the fiction of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), German-speaking Jewish novelist born in Prague, Austria-Hungary. The surname is Czech German, literally 'jackdaw,' and is imitative. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-language writer whose surreal fiction vividly expressed the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century. The opening sentence of his 1915 story 'The Metamorphosis' has become one of the most famous in Western literature (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”), while in his novel The Trial, published a year after his death, a young man finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law after being charged with a crime that is never named. So deft was Kafka’s prose at detailing nightmarish settings in which characters are crushed by nonsensical, blind authority, that writers began using his name as an adjective a mere 16 years after his death. Although many other literary eponyms, from Austenian to Homeric, exist and are common enough, Kafkaesque gets employed more than most and in a wide variety of contexts, leading to occasional charges that the word has been watered down and given a lack of specificity due to overuse. (Merriam-Webster)

pandemonium [pan-duh-moh-nee-uhm]

noun:
1 wild uproar or unrestrained disorder; tumult or chaos.
2 a place or scene of riotous uproar or utter chaos.

Examples:

Those photos of Cassidy hoisting the Stanley Cup say it all: The Golden Knights’ third coach led Las Vegas’ NHL team to the promised land, fulfilling the prophecy and sending this town into total pandemonium. (Readers' Choice - Best Coach: Bruce Cassidy, Las Vegas Weekly, August 2023)

Residents and parents at the school called the previous situation 'pandemonium', saying cars used to 'fly down' to drop kids off for another school over the road. (Jack Fifield, Glorious English summer hustle has been an Ashes rush like no other, The Oldham Times, June 2023)

It's official: The shirt that turned the actor Colin Firth into a heartthrob - and helped fuel the continuing global Jane Austen pandemonium - is coming to the United States. (Sarah Schmelling, The Darcy Shirt, a Tour Rider, The New Yorker, May 2016)

In an instant pandemonium reigned, for the heavy boulder had mowed down a score of the pursuers, breaking arms and legs in its meteoric descent. (Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Monster Men)

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why - when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. (Kate Chopin, The Awakening)

Origin:

1667, Pandæmonium, in 'Paradise Lost' the name of the palace built in the middle of Hell, 'the high capital of Satan and all his peers,' and the abode of all the demons; coined by John Milton (1608-1674) from Greek pan- 'all' + Late Latin daemonium 'evil spirit,' from Greek daimonion 'inferior divine power,' from daimōn 'lesser god'.

Transferred sense 'place of uproar and disorder' is from 1779; that of 'wild, lawless confusion' is from 1865. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

When John Milton needed a name for the gathering place of all demons for Paradise Lost, he turned to the classics as any sensible 17th-century writer would. Pandæmonium, as the capital of Hell is known in the epic poem, combines the Greek prefix pan-, meaning 'all', with the Late Latin daemonium, meaning 'evil spirit'. (Daemonium itself traces back to the far more innocuous Greek word daímōn, meaning 'spirit' or 'divine power'.) Over time, Pandæmonium (or Pandemonium) came to designate all of hell and was used as well for earthbound dens of wickedness and sin. By the late-18th century, the word implied a place or state of confusion or uproar, and from there, it didn’t take long for pandemonium to become associated with states of utter disorder and wildness. (Merriam-Webster)