(lack-uh-DAY-zih-kul)

Means: Lazy, half-hearted, can't be bothered.

Etymology: From the old exclamation lackaday, short for alack the day, which was a sighing "woe is me." By the 1700s lackadaisy was what a mopey, droopy person said, and lackadaisical became the word for anyone with that energy.

"That was the most lackadaisical two-minute drill I've ever seen, and I've watched the Bears for forty years."

The pole barn is a Depression baby. Around 1930, H. Howard Doane, who ran a Midwest farm-management company, decided traditional barns cost more than a farmer could ever earn back, so he set poles straight into the ground and hung the roof and galvanized steel siding off them. His farm manager, B.G. Perkins, refined it in the 1940s with pressure-treated poles and fewer, bigger rafters, and the agricultural engineers' society credits his barns with cutting building costs in half, partly by skipping the concrete foundation. That's the whole style: posts in the dirt carry the load, the walls are just skin, and you get a big, cheap, open box for tractors, bass boats, and the beer fridge.

Decimate started out meaning something very specific and very grim. When a Roman legion mutinied or ran, the army split it into groups of ten, drew lots, and the other nine beat the unlucky one to death. Deci- means ten. Today it usually means wiping out most of something, and the dictionaries are fine with that. But when a guy says injuries decimated the defense, technically he's saying they lost about one starter.

My buddy brags that he and his wife have sex almost every night.

Almost Monday, almost Tuesday, almost Wednesday...

The same three letters finish all four words. What are they?

???GAIN · CROW??? · EM???RASS · ???BECUE

Answer in tomorrow's issue.