Word of the Day

Saturday, January 10, 2009

fastidious

\fa-STID-ee-uhs\ , adjective;

hard to please; extremely refined or critical

Read the full entry|See synonyms|Comment on today's word|Suggest tomorrow's word

Quotes:

For months, his tall, fastidious figure had prowled around the old city hall on Wall Street, examining its eighty-year-old brickwork, muttering to himself in French, or his syntactically challenged English, imagining-where others saw merely a tired old workhorse of a building-a blank canvas upon which to paint an architectural epic.

-- Fergus M. Bordewich, The Making of the American Capital, 2008-05-16

Penske cannot say for sure that being fastidious off the racetrack results in being fast on it. What he can say, though, is that he has created a culture that has fostered loyalty.

-- Dave Caldwell, New York Times, 2006-05-28

Origin:

c 1440, "full of pride," from Latin fastidiosus "disdainful, squeamish, exacting," from fastidium "loathing," most likely from fastu-taidiom, a compound of fastus "contempt, arrogance" and tædium "aversion, disgust." The meaning "squeamish, over-nice" emerged in England by 1612.