brio

brio: n. Vivacity, spirit, fire. [BREE’-o]
• "the rector sang with such brio" -- Christopher Morley:
• "driving with the brio of a Paris taxi-driver" -- J.M.O'Brien
Ety.: Italian, of Celtic origin; akin to Old Irish brg strength, virtue, Welsh bri repute, Cornish bry worth, Middle Breton bri regard
--Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002.http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (4 March 2007).

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THE WORD IN USE:
¶ . . . . He [Arthur Schlesinger]—and [Richard] Hofstadter and [C. Van] Woodward—reached maturity as historians at the precise moment when the nation itself was coming into its own [mid-century America], a freshly minted world power blessed with unparalleled wealth and social mobility”
¶ But it didn’t always seem so. It began as an “age of anxiety.” That it seems grander in retrospect is partly owed to the brio and passion of Mister Schlesinger and his generation of historians. If our own anxious age is to attain similar heights our historians must lead the way (1 + 14).—Tanenhaus,Sam. Books: “History, Written In the Present Tense,” Dispatches, Week in Review, the New York Times, Sunday, March 4, 2007.

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BLOGGIN' JOHN ADDS:
Not surprisingly because of its positive compounding of sound and sense, brio has become a name for fictional characters and a brand name for products and services around the world.

Wikipedia reports that brio--besides being “a noun that means quality of being active or spirited or alive and vigorous [syn: animation, spiritedness, invigoration, vivification]”—[Dictionary.com]—is also a word that can become attached to several things:
• BRIO AB, a Swedish toy-making company
• Brio Magazine from Focus on the Family
• Cafe Brio in Downtown Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
• BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) individual artist grant program of the Bronx Council on the Arts
• Brio Tuscan Grille is an Italian restaurant chain with several locations throughout the U.S.
• MN Brio font
• Brio Realty is an Internet based real estate company.
• Brio is a talking horse of Narnia in the German translation of the book The Horse And His Boy from C.S.Lewis. In the English original the horse is named Bree.
• Brio is a popular brand of Chinotto soft drink.
• Brio is also a popular datawarehouse reporting tool now overtaken by Hyperion Solutions
• HP Brio is a range of desktop PCs.
• BRIO ONE / BRIO STUDIOS Print & Interactive Design Studio, Singapore.

B'N'J'A ADDS:
Brio—a bubbling verbal tonic

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BriO


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