Fwd: A.Word.A.Day--melancholy

[Dave Monroe]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Wordsmith <wsmith at wordsmith.org>
Date: Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 11:12 PM
Subject: A.Word.A.Day--melancholy
To: against.the.dave at gmail.com


Wordsmith.org
The Magic of Words

Jan 18, 2013
This week's theme
Words derived from bodily fluids

This week's words
sang-froid
lymphatic
seminal
salivate
melancholy

A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

melancholy

PRONUNCIATION:
(MEL-uhn-kol-ee)

MEANING:
noun: A pensive, gloomy, depressed state.
adjective: Having or causing a sad mood.

ETYMOLOGY:
>From the former belief that a gloomy state was the result of the excess of
black bile. From Latin melancholia, from Greek melancholia (the condition of
having an excess of black bile), from melan- (black) + chole (bile),
ultimately from the Indo-European root ghel- (to shine), which is also the
source of words such as yellow, gold, glimmer, gloaming, glimpse, glass,
arsenic, and cholera. Earliest documented use: before 1375.

USAGE:
"Loss, estrangement, and distance--and a mood finely poised between
melancholy and melodrama -- are the collection's keynotes."
Life's a beach: New fiction; The Economist (London, UK); Nov 30, 2002.

"His sigh and then his laugh, his melancholy and his humour, made people
like him, and he knew it."
Virginia Woolf; Together and Apart.

Explore "melancholy" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Some tortures are physical / And some are mental, / But the one that is both
/ Is dental. -Ogden Nash, poet (1902-1971)

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