It's the Word of the Day podcast for July 5th.
Today's word is cantankerous, spelled C-A-N-T-A-N-K-E-R-O-U-S.
Cantankerous is an adjective.
A cantankerous person is often angry and annoyed.
And a cantankerous animal or thing is difficult or irritating to deal with.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the New York Times.
The film Hard Truths, which opens in New York on Friday and nationwide in January,
centers on Marianne Jean-Baptiste's pansy,
the cantankerous middle-aged woman who spits venom at unsuspecting shop assistants,
bald babies, her 20-something son Moses, and her dentist, among others.
A person described as cantankerous may find it more difficult than most to turn that frown upside down,
while a cantankerous mule or jalopy is difficult to deal with.
It may not turn in your desired direction.
It's been speculated that the word cantankerous is a product of the obsolete word contact.
meaning contention, under the influence of a pair of difficult words still in use,
rancorous and cankerous.
Rancorous brings the anger and bitter, deep-seated ill will, as rancor can be understood to mean,
and cankerous brings the perhaps understandable foul mood a cankerous person suffers from painful sores,
that is, cankers.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.