A.Word.A.Day --Ballardian

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Sep 7, 2020

This week’s theme
Eponyms

This week’s words
Ballardian
Griselda
Homeric
Juno
Pavlovian

Previous week’s theme
Horses

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

“Don’t be a Johnny!” Chances are you have said something like this some time. (Replace Johnny with the name of someone you know.) What you meant was: Don’t be whiny or don’t be greedy or don’t be finicky or a quality that characterized Johnny.

If so, you made a personal eponym, a word coined after someone. This week we’ll see five eponyms, from Greek ep- (after) + -onym (name), coined after characters from both fact and fiction.

Ballardian

PRONUNCIATION:

(ba-LAHR-dee-uhn)

MEANING:

adjective: Relating to a dystopian world, especially one characterized by social and environmental degradation, assisted by technology.

ETYMOLOGY:

After the novelist and short story writer J.G. Ballard (1930-2009), whose works depict such post-apocalyptic scenarios.

USAGE:

“‘Bunker’, self-evidently a work for our times, shimmers with a Ballardian imagery of disaster and melt-down.”
Ian Thomson; Bunker: Building for the End Times by Bradley Garrett - Review; The Spectator (London, UK); Aug 22, 2020.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it. -Edith Sitwell, poet (7 Sep 1887-1964)

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