This week’s theme
Toponyms

This week’s words
byzantine
erewhonian
Pearl Harbor
Delphic
Roman peace

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(er-uh-WAH/WOH-nee-uhn)

MEANING:

adjective:
1. Opposed to machines, automation, or technology, like a Luddite.
2. Treating disease as crime and ill people as criminals.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Erewhon, a place described in the satirical novel Erewhon (1872) by Samuel Butler. Earliest documented use: 1897.

NOTES:

In Erewhon, criminals are treated as sick and sick people as criminals. Also, Erewhonians consider machines as dangerous and avoid them. The name Erewhon is an anagram of nowhere, also a near ananym (a word coined by reversing the letters of another word).

USAGE:

“To talk about the continued relevance of the book can single you out as a modern Erewhonian.”
Paul Duguid; Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book; The Future of the Book, edited by Geoffrey Nunberg; University of California Press; 1996.

“If patients know they will be pilloried and punished for past behaviour, they will run from the health-care system much as many offenders run from the law. Medicine would simply cease to be medicine if it became an Erewhonian penal system.”
Peter Mcknight; Medicine Isn’t Medicine If Used as Punishment; The Vancouver Sun (Canada); Feb 2, 2022.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: