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A long and winish road led fusty to English’s door. While that road is a bit obscured, evidence suggests that fusty comes from the Middle English noun foist, meaning “wine cask,” which in turn traces back to the Medieval Latin word fustis, meaning “tree trunk” or “wood.” Fusty itself originally described wine that had gone stale from sitting in the cask too long; fusty literally meant that the wine had the “taste of the cask.” Eventually, fusty was used across the culinary universe for any stale food, and especially for damp or moldy food. Those damp and moldy connotations later led fusty to be applied to musty places, and later still to anything that had lost its freshness and interest—that is, to anything old-fashioned.
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Examples of fusty in a Sentence
Deborah Sengupta Stith, Austin American-Statesman, 22 Apr. 2024
The piece deepened the fault lines between Friedrich, the Romantic prince of sublimity and feeling, and the fusty rationalists who preceded him.
—Zachary Fine, The New Yorker, 28 June 2024
The deliciously macabre displays of taxidermy are a highlight, but the museum also manages to avoid feeling too fusty by bringing in contemporary artists to produce works in conversation with its collections, from Sterling Ruby to Jeff Koons.
—Elise Taylor, Vogue, 16 June 2024
Laugh-track shows were coming to seem not just condescending but also stiff and fusty.
—Jacob Stern, The Atlantic, 15 Apr. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Fusty.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fusty. Accessed 21 Dec. 2024.
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