hodie

Hodie is hoc die squeezed into one word, "on this day", and the ablative of time is still visible under the crust once you know to look. It carries two senses: the narrow "today", and a broader "nowadays, in our time", which is the one to reach for when a writer is contrasting his own age with the past.

The adjective is hodiernus, not hodius, and the phrase to have ready is hodierna die, "on this present day". Its descendants are a good lesson in how Latin wears down: Italian oggi, Spanish hoy, and French hui, which survives only inside aujourd'hui - a phrase that, unpacked, says "on the day of on this day". The French have been piling up the same word for eight hundred years.