Word of the Day for Thursday December 29, 2005 quiddity \KWID-ih-tee\, noun: 1. The essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity of a thing. 2. A hairsplitting distinction; a trifling point; a quibble. 3. An eccentricity; an odd feature. He wanted to capture not just live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state: their wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and the crow-ness of the crow --Thomas Nye, quoted in "Ted Hughes, 68, a Symbolic Poet And Sylvia Plath's Husband, Dies," [1]New York Times, October 30, 1998 So far, I have tried to intimate, through meshed parallels and contrasts, something of the nature, the quiddity, of Japanese and of American literature. --Ihab Hassan, "In the mirror of the sun: reflections on Japanese and American literature, Basho to Cage," [2]World Literature Today, March 1, 1995 Boswell set biography a new ambition: capturing the copiousness and quiddity of a personality -- the self peculiarly revealed in odd quirks and, especially, in unpredictable, evanescent talk. --John Mullan, "Dreaming up the Doctor," [3]The Guardian, November 11, 2000 It is neither grammatical subtleties nor logical quiddities, nor the witty contexture of choice words or arguments and syllogisms, that will serve my turn. --Michel de Montaigne, "Of Books" She has looked after my interests with consummate skill, dealt with my quiddities and constantly kept up my spirits. --John Brewer, [4]The Pleasures of the Imagination I began . . . to give some thought to the memoir I had promised to write and wondered how I would go about it -- his freaks, quiddities, oddities, his eating, drinking, shaving, dressing and playfully savaging his students. --Saul Bellow, [5]Ravelstein _________________________________________________________ Quiddity comes from the scholastic Medieval Latin term quidditas, "essence," from quid, "what." References 1. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2. http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/ 3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/ 4. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226074196/ref=nosim/lexico 5. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141001763/ref=nosim/lexico Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=9&q=quiddity