This week’s theme
There’s a word for it

This week’s words
agathism
yesternight
quaestuary
habitus
eschatology

This week’s comments
AWADmail 1018

Next week’s theme
Words for people

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(es-kuh-TOL-uh-jee)

MEANING:

noun: The doctrine or the study of final or ultimate matters, such as, death, judgment, end of the world, etc.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek eschatos (last) + -logy (study). Ultimately from the Indo-European root eghs (out), which also gave us strange, extreme, and external. Earliest documented use: 1844.

NOTES:

What happens after we die? There are as many eschatologies as there are religions, none with any evidence in support of its claims (“My favorite book says so” doesn’t count). In some, you get assigned a whole planet to yourself, in others you get to play a harp and float on a cloud. Here’s something we do have evidence for: We go back to Earth where we came from. If you need more eschatology, the Earth itself gets burned in about five billion years when our Sun runs out of juice and burns out and expands taking down its planets. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy a few rides on our planet around our Sun, take good care of this ride, and everyone traveling with us. Let’s do the best we can in the time we have: a split second on the cosmic scale.

USAGE:

“And now climate change has given us an eschatology for reckoning with our guilt: coming soon, some hellishly overheated tomorrow, is Judgment Day.”
Jonathan Franzen; Carbon Capture; The New Yorker; Apr 6, 2015.

See more usage examples of eschatology in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: