It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 18th.
Today's word is jaunty, spelled J-A-U-N-T-Y.
Jaunty is an adjective.
Something described as jaunty is lively in manner or appearance.
Jonti can also describe something such as an article of clothing that suggests a lively and confident quality.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Are You Happy by Laurie Ostland.
He stood at the front of the room and announced that we would begin with a quiz,
which we all failed
because the quiz was over material that we were supposed to have covered during the last class.
When he handed the quizzes back to us after the break, He did so in a frenetic, almost jaunty way,
running up and down the aisles and announcing our grades, zero, zero,
zero, loudly, before tossing the quizzes down in front of us.
Does throwing on a jaunty hat make one appear more gentile?
Maybe,
but something more definitive links the words both jaunty and gentile come from the French word jaunty,
meaning of aristocratic birth.
Gentile was borrowed first to describe things associated with aristocratic people.
Janti joined the language just a few years later, in the mid 17th century,
as a synonym of the word stylish, and also as a synonym for gentile.
While Gentile has maintained its associations of propriety and high social class,