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

Defiant | Vocabulary | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

To Arms wordsmiths! This video is about the word defiant.

Defiant—it's an adjective. This word means openly disobeying rules, pushing back against authority. This word comes to us from French and ultimately Latin—a late Latin verb disfidare, which means to renounce, to go back on one's faith. Fidus is Latin for faith or trust, and dis means not or away.

So with that in mind, what are some English words that you can think of that contain those elements dis or FID? You're probably wondering about D and D; those are different sounds, but they mean the exact same thing in Latin—they both mean not or away.

I'll give you 10 seconds to think, and then show you what I came up with. Here we go!

Here are some of mine: dislike, which means not liking something; fidelity, which is like faithfulness or loyalty; and confidence, which is like saying you trust yourself, you have faith in yourself.

Let's use it in a sentence or two. In fact, let me show you a couple of forms of this word because you can use it as a verb, as defy or defies, as in "Luella defied her father and snuck out at night."

And then, when we turn it back into an adjective by adding that ant ending, we get defiant. Again, Plumaria Goodart was defiant; she would never give in to Lady Morant.

Little hoby woman over here brimming with goodness, big evil sorceress over here crackling with lightning—feel my wrath! I'll never join you, etc., etc. You get the picture.

To be defiant is to be bold, audacious, rebellious, unruly. A defiant person openly flouts rules and fights authority.

So when you want to turn that adjective defiant into a noun, you turn the ant into an ance. Defiant becomes defiance. That's how you talk about it as a noun.

Let me use it in a sentence: "The rebels showed their defiance through performances of forbidden dance."

The most forbidden dance of all is the dance of neurons blazing through your mind as they make new connections—sparks flying in the deepness of your mind as your brain becomes a bright, shimmering beacon of knowledge.

The Roomba of rumination, the Bachata of brilliance, the Lambada of learning—you can learn anything.

David out!

More Articles

View All
Save the Ocean, Save Ourselves | Sea of Hope: America's Underwater Treasures
There’s been this arc to my career in the sense that in the beginning I just wanted to make beautiful pictures. But I began more and more to see all these problems happening in the ocean. Fewer fish in the places I used to see many fish, or not as many sh…
YouTube Is Deleting My Channel - What Happened
What’s up, guys? It’s Graham here. So to bring everyone up to speed with what happened, I posted a video about three weeks ago that YouTube had scheduled my channel for deletion on July 12th. This was a giant red notice that came completely out of nowher…
Angular velocity graphs due to multiple torques
A disc is initially rotating clockwise around a fixed axis with angular speed omega naught. At time t equals 0, the two forces, F₁ is equal to 20 newtons and F₂ is equal to 10 newtons, are exerted on the disk as shown in the figure below. So these are the…
Government supervision and regulation of banking institutions | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy
So whenever you’re dealing with banking, there’s a whole series of government agencies and quasi pseudo-government organizations. I’ll talk a little bit about why it’s quasi-government. That influence what’s happening with banks, and it’s useful to know w…
My Sister Got Malaria ....(And I Didn't) - Smarter Every Day 167
Video about global health issues. Now, here’s the deal: when you think about—let’s make a video about global health issues—you think about statistics and numbers and like money, or you think about your sister who served in the Peace Corps in Sub-Saharan A…
Identifying values in scale drawings
We’re told that figure A is a scale image of figure B. So that’s figure A; this is figure B. Here, the scale that maps figure A to figure B is one to two and one half. What is the value of x? All right, pause this video and see if you can figure it out. …