Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 20th.
Today's word is raffish, spelled R-A-F-F-I-S-H.
Raffish is an adjective.
It describes people and things that show a careless but usually attractive unconventionality.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Harper's Magazine.
Three or four decades ago, the newspaper man was appealingly raffish,
at once a bum who drank too much and a knight-errant who charged unafraid at social injustice, suckered the weak,
and crossed lances with the powerful and arrogant.
Raffish combines the English noun raff with the suffix ish, which in this case means characteristic of.
When we use the word raffish, we literally means resembling raff.
But what exactly is raff?
You might be more familiar with raff's synonym, riffraff, which refers to disreputable people of low social status.
Despite the resemblance, these two nouns are distinct in origin.
Raff comes directly from the Middle English raff, R-A-F, meaning rubbish,
while riffraff descends from the Anglo-French riff et raff, meaning altogether.
The similarities between raff and riffraff prompted people to start using the two words as synonyms,
and raff gained a rabble sense.
It was that ragtag raff that gave rise to the adjective raffish in the late 1700s.
With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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