Contentious | Vocabulary | Khan Academy

I've got a bone to pick with you wordsmiths because this video is about the word contentious. Contentious is an adjective and it means involving arguing, quarrelsome. We had a contentious debate over whether bears were scarier than snakes. Kind of looks like a pig, but you know pigs can also be scary.

I don't know, this word comes to us from Latin, contentious, and it's a combination of two parts: con, which means together or with, and tend, which means to stretch. To contend for something in English is to fight for it with someone else, right? You're stretching your relationship with someone, like a tug of war where you're both pulling on the end of a rope.

So, something that's contentious is, for lack of a better word, fighty, argumentative. Keeping those elements, con and tend, in mind, try to come up with a couple of similar words in English that contain those parts. I'll give you 10 seconds.

All right, Take Me Home, Country Road. [Music]

Here are some of mine: tension, which is when something is stretched tight, like a rubber band or a spring, or it can also be a kind of unspoken conflict between people. Container: a box, an enclosure of some kind. Con-tainer means held together, and extend means to stretch out, right? To extend the hand of friendship.

Let's try it in a sentence: over a series of contentious meetings, Team Cake finally agreed to a compromise with Team Pie. It must have been a bitter conflict, well, I guess a sweet conflict, actually.

Another one: when we play Monopoly, it's always a contentious issue as to who gets to be the thimble. That's a weird thing to argue over, in my opinion. I love a thimble, sure, but you know the Scottie dog and the top hat are right there.

Do not pass go, do not collect 200 vocabulary words. We gotta hash this argument out first, you contentious wordsmiths! You can learn anything. David out.