Reading the Merriam Webster Dictionary Backwards
September 13, 2014 Saturday
blog address: Readingthedictionarybackwards.blogspot.com
email: ishmaelish36@blogspot.com
You can find my other blog of pediatric anecdotes, poetry, artwork and literature at ishmaelish36.blogspot.com
The letter "W" has 43 pages of words; a little different from the "X's."
Weltanschauung \velt' en shung\ [German velt world, anschauung view]
literally one's world view ('a comprehensive conception of the world').
A word that, to me, draws up feelings of longing and memories, long lost dreams. What was the Weltanschauung of one's innocent life as a four year old? In grade school? The air, the light had a certain quality, a pervasive warmth, my home had a certain loving glow…joyful and hopeful All was new.
It reminds me of a book written about, I think, the wonderfully productive time of a culmination of the arts and literature in Austria and Europe in general in the late 1800's…the book was beautifully titled with the word fin de siecle (Vienna), pertaining to this time and culture and it always sounded so exciting and romantic to me. It was the atmospheric Weltanschauunng of that time of renaissance.
In my dry, Bob Newhart style of humor, I have used this word for decades as an almost 100% failed joke…no other philosophy majors to appreciate the subtlety of this insight (sarcasm here)…When someone asks me to write a brief note to someone, an opinion perhaps, I will look up, pen in hand, and say casually, "How do you spell Weltanschauung?" See what I mean?
mental apathy or depression caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state. A mood of sentimental sadness.
Of course, this word is diametrically opposed to the beautiful connotations of Weltanschuaang. I worked with Dr. Hal Winters, a gray haired, elderly African-American pediatrician, an exact replica of Bill Cosby (with extra poundage) when I was in the Public Health Service in inner city Paterson for two years after my residency. I could fill a small book with his humor. We saw a lot of alcohol and drug abuse and we would sometimes just sit back in our cramped, dilapidated office in the middle of this poverty and squalor and talk about the state of the world. I said to Hal, "The problem with drugs and alcohol is that it distorts your view of reality." He looked around the room, at the chipped plywood doors, the peeling paint, the water stained ceiling as the constant stream of poor children from the Public Housing walked by, looked at me with a wry smile and said, "And we wouldn't want to distort reality."
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