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If you’ve ever felt swept aside by someone with a brusque manner, that makes a certain amount of etymological sense. Brusque, you see, comes ultimately from bruscus, the Medieval Latin name for butcher’s broom, a shrub whose bristly, leaf-like twigs have long been used for making brooms. Bruscus was modified to the adjective brusco in Italian, where it meant “sour” or “tart.” French, in turn, changed brusco to brusque, and the word in that form entered English in the 1600s. English speakers initially applied brusque to tartness in wine, but the word soon came to describe a harsh and stiff manner, which is just what you might expect of a word bristling with associations to stiff, scratchy brooms.
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Examples of brusque in a Sentence
Rebecca Aizin, Peoplemag, 4 Apr. 2024
Lennon understandably feared that McCartney’s father-in-law could never be a neutral third party, and instead favored Allen Klein, a brusque and streetwise business barracuda.
—Jordan Runtagh, Peoplemag, 29 Mar. 2024
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“Brusque.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brusque. Accessed 29 May. 2024.
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brusque
adjective
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