Fwd: A.Word.A.Day--inwit

[Dave Monroe]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Wordsmith <wsmith at wordsmith.org>
Date: Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 11:18 PM
Subject: A.Word.A.Day--inwit
To: against.the.dave at gmail.com


Dec 27, 2011
This week's theme
Archaic words

This week's words
mickle
inwit

inwit

PRONUNCIATION:
(IN-wit)

MEANING:
noun:
1. Conscience.
2. Reason, intellect.
3. Courage.

ETYMOLOGY:
>From Old English inwit, from in + wit (mind, thought). Earliest
documented use: 1230.

NOTES:
The word is usually seen as part of the phrase agenbite of inwit.
Agenbite (remorse) is literally, again-bite, a variant of ayenbite,
from ayen (again) + bite. James Joyce reanimated this ancient term
back into the language when he used it in Ulysses.

USAGE:
"The Journals of Sylvia Plath may be intensely introspective, full of
the agenbite of inwit, but they are just as intensely external,
describing -- with an attentiveness one can't imagine in any male
diarist -- food, furniture, hair, flowers, colours, and clothes."
Blake Morrison; Love at First Bite; Independent On Sunday (London,
UK); Apr 2, 2000.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an
institution. -Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher (1905-1980)

http://wordsmith.org/words/inwit.html