Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Digging in your heels -- recalcitrant

from www.wordsmith.org

recalcitrant (ri-KAL-si-truhnt) adjective
Stubbornly resistant to authority.
[From Latin recalcitrare (to kick back, to be disobedient), from re- (again) + calcitrare (to kick), from calx (heel). If you have a dog that has dug his heels in while you're trying to pull him forward, you have a case of an animal that's being recalcitrant, literally.]

Click here to see recalcitrant in the Visual Thesaurus.

"Mount Kelut has been on high alert for more than two weeks but activity escalated dramatically on Friday, triggering fresh rounds of evacuations carried out by troops and local officials. On Saturday, some recalcitrant residents were dragged from their homes."
-- Indonesia's Mount Kelut Erupts; Agence France-Presse; Nov 3, 2007.

No comments: