Word of the day

While racism is never funny, it sometimes does serve as a way of learning new words to describe people in fantastically unflattering ways.  Here is today's sentence used when a British writer sought to do a study of Dhofar and its people in 1943.

"They are a small limbed, dark skinned race with well chiselled [sic] features, still in a nomadic and troglodytic state."

I needed to look up troglodytic, seeing as I could have easily mistaken it for Mesozoic or some other age of dinosaurs.  It apparently means:

(esp. in prehistoric times) a person who lived in a cave.

• a hermit.

• a person who is regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.

Even the word's origin was a bit "racist."

ORIGIN late 15th cent.: via Latin from Greek trōglodutēs, alteration of the name of an Ethiopian people, influenced by trōglē ‘hole.’

And that is my word of the day.

*Definition and origin courtesy of New Oxford American Dictionary