Word of the Day
Inure (in-YOOR)
Variant: Enure
To habituate; to accustom to something
Common clues: Accustom; Accustom to hardship; Make accustom to
Crossword puzzle frequency: 4 times a year
To habituate; to accustom; to apply or expose in use or practice till use gives little or no pain or inconvenience, or makes little impression. Thus a man inures his body to labor and toil, till he sustains that which would destroy a body unaccustomed to it. So we inure ourselves to cold or heat. Warriors are inured to blood, and seamen are inured to hardships and deprivations.
-from Webster’s 1828 Dictionary
“Man
With Load”, Robert Blackburn, 1936
What is comprehended in the march of a great army under the burning Southern suns of June and July? Will our rugged farmers who sweat in the harvest fields, or the tradesmen who daily put forth strong muscular effort in their ordinary business, beleive me when assuring them that, were the strongest from among their number for the first time to be arrayed with what each soldier daily and for many hours and many miles carries - knapsack, haversack, gun, ammunition pouch, tin cup, canteen, coffee boiler, with various other etceteras, weighing in all about as much as a bushel of wheat - and he, thus accoutered, started in the middle of a hot July day, on a dusty road, amid a thick and smothering crowd of men, horses, mules, and wagons, in less than a mile he would fall prostrate to the earth, and perhaps never be able to rise again. It has, however, taken two years of terrible practice to inure these iron men to undergo this wonderful physical endurance. Nor must it be forgotten that, in the hardening process, two out of three have sunk under the toil and exposure, and have disappeared from the army.
-from The Lost Diaries of the American Civil War
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