yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Debris | Vocabulary | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Oh hello, word Smith! You've caught me at a bit of an awkward time. You see, I've just survived a storm at sea; there was a shipwreck, and I clung to a piece of debris like a barnacle. I floated ashore like a bug on a twig.

I've got to do a word, don't I? Okay, uh, right, let's uh, let's do debris. How about that? Debris! The 'S' is silent because it comes from French. Now, this largish piece of driftwood is a great example. Debris is a noun; it means trash, remnants of broken things. I think that piece of debris floating in the water used to be the ship's crow's nest.

This word comes from French "de," which means to break apart, and we can break that word apart into two pieces: "D" or "du," meaning off, away, or down, and "breeze," meaning to break. That's what happened when a huge wave struck the ship I was on; it broke apart, and pieces of debris floated away from it.

All right, let's try to come up with some other related words that use the prefix "d" or "du" and look like the French word "bre." All right, 10 seconds, here we go. I'll put on some music. Here is what I came up with:

Debunk, to knock down a bad idea from the wonderful old-fashioned American slang term "bunkum," which means nonsense. So to debunk something is to knock the nonsense out of it. To bruise something is to cause an injury that discolors the skin. To crush, to bonk; it comes from the same root as "breeze," to break. Debate—this word means to match ideas, to argue. Its literal meaning is to beat down; "débat" in French.

The original meaning is just to fight, but its meaning was softened into an argument instead of a fistfight. Now, let's use debris in a sentence or two. After the storm, Shipbreaker Bay was clogged with flum and debris from half a dozen vessels.

Flum is one of my favorite not-words; it is specifically sea debris—the stuff that washes ashore after a shipwreck or a storm. But debris doesn't have to be shipwreck stuff; it's anything left over from when something is wrecked. You can use it figuratively like so: sighing, Danela picked at the debris of what used to be a pizza before her brothers got to it. Hardly anything remains of that pizza; just the box and a couple pieces of crust. Pizza debris—some people call those pizza bones.

I have never left the crusts on pizza; I always eat them, but to each their own. Incidentally, in New Orleans, if you order a Po'Boy—a sandwich with deb—accent on the first syllable—you're getting gravy-soaked beef. They call it "de" because that gravy is made with the remains, the debris of other roast beefs. It's an incredible sandwich—a Po'Boy with "de."

We're here for your sandwich needs and your vocabulary needs, too! We're a full-service shop here at CON. You can learn anything!

More Articles

View All
The discovery of the double helix structure of DNA
In 1865, Mendel, often considered the father of modern genetics, comes up with a structured way of thinking about these inheritable factors, which we now call genes. Then, as we go into the early 1900s, his work was rediscovered, and people started to say…
Brie Larson Eats a Rhino Beetle | Running Wild With Bear Grylls
So were you kind of adventurous when you were growing up, or– I wanted to be Indiana Jones when I was younger, but then– Really? –I also was super shy. And were you like, sporty? No, not at all. BEAR GRYLLS: So what, more geeky? I was super geeky. …
Erin Frey on Therapy
Hi, I’m Ain. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Kip, a Y Combinator startup that helps you get amazing therapy. I started going to therapy when I realized that stress and anxiety were affecting my ability to do good work. I was waking up anxious every morning…
Applying volume of solids | Solid geometry | High school geometry | Khan Academy
We’re told that a cone-shaped grain hopper, and they put the highlight hopper in blue here in case you want to know its definition on the exercise. It’s something that would store grain, and then it can kind of fall out of the bottom. It has a radius of …
Alzheimer's and the Brain
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. If you have a watch or a clock nearby, take a look at its hour hand. It moves, completing a trip all the way around twice a day. Its motion is too slow to see, but try really look at it right now. Watch how far it travels in on…
Angles in circles word problem | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy
If Ariana turns the stove dial 135 degrees to the right, what setting will the dial be on? So, two very important things up here: first, she’s turning the dial 135 degrees, and which way is she turning the dial? She’s turning the dial to the right. So he…