Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Word of the Week

Have you been using your recently acquired verbal gems to decorate your daily speech? If so, great! If some of those words have fallen into the oubliette of your mind, then you had better get to work at manumitting them.

This week's word is another treasure that would be a very important concept to one who has been placed into an oubliette. Our word for this week, manumit, dates back to the 15th century and comes to us from the Latin word manumittere, which means to release from slavery or bondage. It also has two Latin components, one of which is manu, which also means hand. The caboose-end of this word is mittere, which means to let go or send. Putting them together, manumit literally means to send out from someones hand.

Common terms: manu as manual labor and emittere as the sun emitted warming rays.

If manumit means to free from slavery and bondage, then the act of freeing some would manumission, and the one doing the freeing is the emancipator, liberator, or manumitter. After you have ben freed, then it could be said that you have been manumitted!

How do you pronounce this freeing word? This is an easy one: / man - you - mitt / That's it.

Putting this word to practical use is a very liberating experience, so let's do it.

Lets use a Bible reference that tells us what Jesus came to do. Jesus came not only to preach manumission to the captives that were held in slavery to sin and death, but to pay the price for their release.

Luke 4:18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, 19, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

Hope you enjoyed this weeks fun vocabulary word.