ab ovo: from the beginning

how to use in casual conversation:

"play that song again boys, ab ovo"
"ab ovo, there were tacos and woe, it was good"

not to be confused with:

an oboe

how it makes me feel:

i'm kind of torn here. first of all it's from MW and you know how i feel about them. but it's latin. i like latin. i wish i spoke it but i have more pressing things to do with my time. but if i ever win the lottery i'm going to learn latin and lay around a palatial apartment and have half-naked women feed me grapes a la caesar. caesar was a badass. yeah.

right....so yeah it's in latin, but it isn't a word! it's two, or three depending on your perspective. if MW wanted to start a site called weirdasslatinphraseoftheday.com i would totally get behind that, but they haven't. this is a phrase and therefore cannot truly be evaluated as a WOTD and is a shining example of why MW, a well respected name in dictionaries and geekism in general, makes me drink myself to sleep at night. ok, so that's an exaggeration but i still don't get how they could be so inept sometimes and so genius others.

editorial note:

roman buffs and people who watched waaaaay too much history channel back in the day when all they did was run world war II documentaries and stuff on ancient western civ would do well to check out the 'did you know' on the entry for ab ovo. it's fascinating stuff.