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Peter Sokolowski
Foreign It's Merriam Webster's Word of the Day for February 20th. Today's Word is flounder, spelled F L O U N D E R. Flounder is a verb. To flounder is to struggle, whether that struggle is about moving or obtaining footing, as in horses floundering through deep snow, or about knowing what to do or say. Here's the word used in a sentence from Hard By a Great Forest by Leo Vardia Chevili in those early days, we floundered in a city we didn't know. Tottenham in 1992 wasn't the London we'd imagined. There were no top hats, no smog, no Holmes, no Watson, no ladies, no gents, and no afternoon tea. Not for us. We lived in a different London. In our London, people swore and spat, drank, quarreled and laughed in fretful bursts. They spoke strange words in accents we couldn't parse. There's nothing fishy about the word flounder, the verb that is. While the noun referring to a common food fish is of Scandinavian origin, the verb flounder, which dates to the late 16th century, is likely an alteration of an older verb, founder. The two verbs have been confused ever since. Today, founder is most often used as a synonym of the word fail or, in contexts involving a waterborne vessel, as a word meaning to fill with water and sink. Formerly, it was also frequently applied when a horse stumbled badly and was unable to keep walking. It's likely this sense of founder led to the original and now obsolete meaning of flounder, to stumble. In modern use, flounder typically means to struggle or to act clumsily. The word lacks the finality of founder, which usually suggests complete collapse or failure, as that of a sinking ship. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski. Visit Merriam Webster.com today for definitions, wordplay and trending. Word lookups.