C
We're in the middle of our amble through the early stages of the alphabet with the help of Buckley: The Right Word by the late, beloved William F. Buckley. The writer was celebrated for his adroit use of English vocabulary and this is our humble acknowledgment of his word skill. The definition below is from "A Buckley Lexicon", which was appended to The Right Word, and the example sentence is by way of Buckley's 1987 novel, Mongoose, R.I.P: A Blackford Oakes Mystery. A contemporary example rounds out the day.
chimera (noun) An imagined idea, person, or fancy, unusually impractical, romantic.
"Turning his head abeam, the constellation his eyes fixed on had splashes of starry hair that shimmered, and eyes to steer by, and lips set in a pensive, seductive mode. He felt a luff in the sail, snapped his head forward to the mast, and quickly located his navigational star. He had wandered high on his course, while looking back at that chimera over Mexico."
The eloquent Irish economist David McWilliams used the word in its imagined, romantic sense in the Sunday Business Post: "Ireland is now a country that lives in the future. An entire generation believes in the New Irish Dream, which is based on the chimera that tomorrow will always be better than today. The financial engine fuelling the dream is housing wealth." Tomorrow, D.
Comments
Chimera has many meanings apart from the way WFB (or Williams)used it -- with a lower-case "c."
Homer's brief description in the Iliad is the earliest literary reference: "a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire."
In medicine, a person composed of two genetically distinct types of cells is a chimera.
Posted by: Henry Barth | April 23, 2008 6:05 PM