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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Here's words and explanantion for ya...

 

Intransigent comes from Spanish intransigente, meaning "uncompromising." Its root is transigir ("to compromise"), which is related to Latin transigere ("to come to an agreement"). The French have a similar verb, transiger, which also means "to compromise." Transigent as an opposite of intransigent has yet to become recognized as an acceptable word in the English language.



 Pilcrow: Apparently an alteration of the word paragraph, with r changing into l and remodeled along the more familiar words pill and crow. Earliest documented use: 1440.

In the beginning, a piece of writing was one big amorphous chunk of text: no punctuation, no upper/lowercase, no spaces. Writing real estate was expensive, whether tablets, skins, or papyrus. With time punctuation marks entered the language. A pilcrow signified a change in topic, even though the text still flowed without any visual breaks.

Eventually, actual paragraph breaks were employed and the pilcrow sat at the beginning of the paragraph, often embellished in red color. When printing came along, the hand embellishment of the pilcrow disappeared though the space marked for it remained at the beginning of the paragraph as an indent.

The pilcrow took a well-earned retirement and is no longer used.



 Originally, mettle was simply a variant spelling of the word metal (which dates to at least the 13th century), and it was used in all of the same senses as its metallic relative. Over time, however, mettle came to be used mainly in figurative senses referring to the quality of someone's character. It eventually became a distinct English word in its own right, losing its literal sense altogether. Metal remained a term primarily used for those hard, shiny substances such as steel or iron, but it also acquired a figurative use. Today, both words can mean "vigor and strength of spirit or temperament," but only metal is used of metallic substances.