{"id":6723,"date":"2024-04-16T01:46:38","date_gmt":"2024-04-16T01:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/?p=6723"},"modified":"2024-04-16T01:49:35","modified_gmt":"2024-04-16T01:49:35","slug":"word-of-the-day-neophilia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/2024\/04\/16\/word-of-the-day-neophilia\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Day: Neophilia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today\u2019s word of the day, thanks to Wordsmith.org\u2019s A_Word_A_Day email, is neophilia<\/em>. The email says that this noun means \u201cThe love of what\u2019s new or novel.\u201d Dictionary.com defines it as \u201ca tendency to like anything new; love of novelty\u201d (https:\/\/www.dictionary.com\/browse\/neophilia<\/a>). Yourdictionary.com defines it as \u201cLove of new things\u201d (https:\/\/www.yourdictionary.com\/neophilia<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Merriam-Webster, whose definition is almost identical to Wordsmith.org\u2019s, but then it adds this: \u201cThe earliest known example of neophilia<\/em> in print is from an 1899 issue of Political Science Quarterly<\/em>, a publication of Columbia University. The word is a combination of the Greek-derived combining forms neo-<\/em>, meaning \u2018new,\u2019 and -philia<\/em>, meaning \u2018liking for.\u2019 In the 1930s, the form neophily<\/em> was introduced as a synonym of neophilia<\/em>, but no neophilia could save it from obscurity-it has never caught on. The opposite of neophilia<\/em> is neophobia<\/em>, meaning \u2018a dread of or aversion to novelty.\u2019 It has been around slightly longer than neophilia<\/em>, having first appeared in 1886\u201d (https:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/dictionary\/neophilia<\/a>). It is pronounced \/ (\u02ccni\u02d0\u0259\u028a\u02c8f\u026al\u026a\u0259) \/; the comma-looking mark before ni<\/em> indicates a secondary stress, while the primary stress is on the third syllable, indicated by the apostrophe before it. The colon-looking mark after ni<\/em> indicates that the vowel i<\/em> (pronounced like the vowel sound in beet<\/em>) is long, drawn out a little bit rather than cut off quickly. I couldn\u2019t find a pronunciation for neophily, but I would imagine that it would pronounced \/ (ni\u2019af\u026ali) \/, with the stress on the second syllable and no stress on the first syllable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way, if you are interested in the International Phonetic Alphabet, you can find more information about it at https:\/\/www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org\/ipa-sounds\/ipa-chart-with-sounds\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On this date every year, my mind goes to T. S. Eliot, which is not a bad place to go, though the reason for it is perhaps a bit silly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, MO, on September 26, 1888, to a well-off, even prominent family. His grandfather had moved from New England to start a Unitarian Church in St. Louis. His father was the president of a brick company, and his mother was a social worker. As a boy, Eliot had a health condition that prevented him from playing sports and other physical activities, so he developed a love of reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He went to a preparatory school in Massachusetts for a year before attending Harvard College from 1906 to 1910, finishing with a bachelor\u2019s and a master\u2019s in literature. \u201cFrank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot’s undergraduate career was in 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature<\/em>. This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbi\u00e8re and his book Les amours jaunes<\/em>, a work that affected the course of Eliot’s life\u201d (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/T._S._Eliot<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1910, he moved to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne\u2014philosophy and poetry. Then he went back to Harvard to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. In 1914, he received a scholarship to study at Oxford in England, but he didn\u2019t really like Oxford, so he spent a lot of his time in London (London and Oxford are not really very far apart, and England has a good train system that makes it easy to travel from one to the other\u2014I once lost a piece of luggage at the Oxford train station). It was during this time that he met two people who had a profound influence on his adult life, Ezra Pound, the American poet, and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom he married, though the marriage proved an unhappy one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eliot\u2019s most famous poem is \u201cThe Love Son of J. Alfred Prufrock,\u201d a poem which has bedeviled college students for a hundred years. But the poem that has been the most influential, at least on the intellectual class, is \u201cThe Waste Land,\u201d which is a somewhat dark and despairing poem. It begins,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, given that April in the USA is when we have to submit taxes for the previous year\u2019s income, the notion that April is the cruellest month seems fitting, although, as I said, a bit silly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After this dark period in Eliot\u2019s life, a period which included the First World War, Eliot went through a kind of transformation. In 1927, he converted from Unitarianism to the Anglican Church, the Church of England. He also became a British citizen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think his best poem is one that gets less attention than \u201cPrufrock\u201d or \u201cThe Waste Land.\u201d It\u2019s called The Four Quartets<\/em>. And my favorite lines from that poem come from the last section, called \u201cLittle Gidding.\u201d The \u201ctitle refers to a small Anglican community in Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, established by Nicholas Ferrar in the 17th century and scattered during the English Civil War\u201d (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Little_Gidding_(poem)<\/a>). Here are the lines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I love about these lines is that Eliot confirms the need to explore, intellectually as well as in other ways, but also confirms that it\u2019s okay if our exploration takes us back home, the place where we started. But in returning to those roots, we have to know it for ourselves. Many of us take our beliefs from our parents or grandparents and never challenge them or explore others. When we do that, we never have the opportunity to make our believes our own\u2014they are always an inheritance. Others suffer from neophilia, believing anything new as if the old things have nothing to offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image today is \u201cThe Starnberger See near Munich with the Alps in the background\u201d (https:\/\/www.germansights.com\/bavaria\/starnberger-see.php). I chose it because the lake appears in lines in \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d: \u201cSummer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee \/ With a shower of rain.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s word of the day, thanks to Wordsmith.org\u2019s A_Word_A_Day email, is neophilia. The email says that this noun means \u201cThe love of what\u2019s new or novel.\u201d Dictionary.com defines it as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[238,395,284,675,676],"class_list":["post-6723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","tag-dictionary","tag-etymology","tag-linguistics","tag-neophilia","tag-t-s-eliot","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6723"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6726,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6723\/revisions\/6726"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}