Word of the Day: Stygian

 Stygian

extremely dark, gloomy, or forbidding

The "dark and gloomy" sense of stygian is a figurative one, as the original meaning of the word (which may also be found in capitalized form) was decidedly literal ("of or relating to the river Styx"). This was the river presided over by the boatman Charon, who would ferry across the souls of the dead on their way to the underworld of Hades. The literal sense began to be used in the early 16th century, and by the beginning of the 17th had taken on its figurative sense.

Now mischief, murder, wrath of hell drawth nere 
and dyre Phlegethon flood doth blood require 
Achilles death shalbe reuenged here 
With slaughter such as Stygian lakes desyre 
Her daughters blood shall slake the sprites yre, 
Whose sonne we slew. wherof doth yet remayne, 
The wrath beneath, and hell shalbe theyr payne.
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca (trans. by Jasper Heywood), The Sixth Tragedy, 1559

Word of the Day: Sarcasm

Sarcasm

Definition:

: a keen or bitter taunt : a cutting gibe or rebuke often delivered in a tone of contempt or disgust

About the Word:

Sarcasm, that verbal flourish beloved by supercilious people the world over, has the sort of origin that makes other words jealous. It is descended ultimately from the ancient Greek word sarkazein, which means 'to tear flesh like dogs' (or also 'to bite the lips in rage' or 'to speak bitterly').

Word of the Day

phrontistery

plural -es
: a place for thinking or study

Word of the Day: Luddite

Luddite

noun LUH-dyte
: one of a group of early 19th-century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change

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Did You Know?

Luddites could be considered the first victims of corporate downsizing. The Luddite movement began in the vicinity of Nottingham, England, toward the end of 1811 when textile mill workers rioted for the destruction of the new machinery that was slowly replacing them. Their name is of uncertain origin, but it may be connected to a (probably mythical) person known as Ned Ludd. According to an unsubstantiated account in George Pellew's Life of Lord Sidmouth (1847), Ned Ludd was a Leicestershire villager of the late 1700s who, in a fit of insane rage, rushed into a stocking weaver's house and destroyed his equipment; subsequently, his name was proverbially connected with machinery destruction. With the onset of the information age, Luddite gained a broader sense describing anyone who shuns new technology.

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Examples

Responding to an interview question in Parade, July 2008, actress/screenwriter Emma Thompson jested, "I'm a Luddite, and I write longhand with an old fountain pen."

"It's not that firefighters are Luddites. But in life-and-death situations, they can't afford to rely on solutions that haven't been thoroughly field-tested." — Carolyn Said, The San Francisco Chronicle, 5 Aug. 2018

The anticlimax of phototropism

Vellichor
It's a made up word, found in the collection of made up words, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, collected / created by John Koenig.

Vellichor is not a real word, as such things are counted, but according to Koenig it means "The strange wistfulness of used bookstores."

I think it's a perfectly perfect name for a printing press that revives forgotten and now out of print books.

I stumbled on all this accidentally, a gift of online dictionaries, all while looking up the meaning of
THIGMOTROPISM.

hoo boy, what a word, I thought!
and the definition turns out to be up to the vessel
first, it's real.
second, it means:
the turning or bending of a plant or other organism in response to a touch stimulus.
how gorgeous is that?

And yet neither of these words is the one I went out looking for, the one whose meaning I know but whose name I do not, the word that is the bending of a plant in response to the shifts of availability of light. After vellichor and thigmotropism, phototropism  seems anticlimactic, somehow.

Word of the Day: enantiodromia

Brought to my attention by a friend, enantiodromia was coined by C. G. Jung to express the notion that the superabundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite

Now if I only knew how to say it, I could use it in a sentence.