A.Word.A.Day --agnosia

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agnosia

PRONUNCIATION:

(ag-NO-zhuh)

MEANING:

noun: Loss of ability to recognize objects, people, sounds, etc., usually caused by brain injury.

Cartoonist: Doug Pike

lwei: a fomer monetary unit of Angola
ekpwele/ekwele/ekuele: a former monetary unit of Equatorial Guinea

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek agnosia (ignorance), from a- (without) + gnosis (knowledge). Ultimately from the Indo-European root gno- (to know) that is the ancestor of such words as know, can, notorious, notice, connoisseur, recognize, agnostic, diagnosis, ignore, annotate, noble, narrate, anagnorisis (the moment of recognition), and gnomon.
Also see prosopagnosia (inability to recognize familiar faces) and alexia (word blindness).

USAGE:

"Jeff Koons turns agnosia into an artistic principle. And that has the effect of letting us see our world, and art, as profoundly other than it usually is."
Blake Gopnik; Man From Mars Comes in Peace; The Washington Post; Jun 17, 2008.

See more usage examples of agnosia in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old -- reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

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