The word for today is…

funambulism (noun) –
1 : tightrope walking
2 : a show especially of mental agility

Source : Merriam -Webster

Etymology : Back in ancient Rome, tightrope walking was a popular spectacle at public gatherings. The Latin word for “tightrope walker” is “funambulus,” from the Latin funis, meaning “rope,” plus ambulare, meaning “to walk.” It doesn’t take any funambulism on our part to see how the word for an impressive act of physical skill and agility came to mean an impressive act of mental skill or agility. That extended sense of the word has been around since at least 1886, when British academic and writer Augustus Jessopp described the act of diagramming sentences as “horrible lessons of ghastly grammar and dreary funambulism.”

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David is a retired surgeon originally from London who came to New Zealand twenty-seven years ago after being delayed in Singapore for thirteen years on leaving the UK. He was coerced into studying Latin...