{"id":18490,"date":"2022-10-26T05:13:09","date_gmt":"2022-10-26T12:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18490"},"modified":"2022-10-26T05:13:09","modified_gmt":"2022-10-26T12:13:09","slug":"condign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2022\/10\/26\/condign\/","title":{"rendered":"condign"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>The NYT Spelling Bee today contains the letters in <i>condign<\/i>, which I know from the Gilbert &amp; Sullivan (well, Gilbert) lyric in <cite>The Mikado<\/cite>\u2019s famous <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gsarchive.net\/mikado\/webopera\/mk110.html\">\u201cshort sharp shock\u201d<\/a> trio. Poo-Bah sings \u201cWith grief condign, I must decline\u201d to be executed in Ko-Ko\u2019s place.\r\n<p>It occurred to me, as the Bee was quite properly rejecting it, that I had no idea what it meant. That is, I always vaguely assumed Poo-Bah was indicating, in the most Poo-Bah way possible, that his grief was substantial, but I had never looked it up. Nor have I ever, to my recollection, ever heard or read the word in any other context.\r\n<p>So, in case anyone else is in the same boat, <i>condign<\/i> means, more or less, <i>worthy<\/i> or <i>fitting<\/i>. So Poo-Bah is not so much saying that his grief was intense, as that it was the amount of grief appropriate to the occasion.\r\n<p>Thanks,<br>-Ed.\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The noun form, according to the OED, is condignity, although Johnson lists condignness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lyrics","category-specific-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18490"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18491,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18490\/revisions\/18491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}