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posthumous: msg#00028culture.language.word-of-the-day
**************************************************************** Do you march to the beat of a different drummer? Discover the origin of this term in our Dictionary of Allusions. http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/book.pl?allusion.htm&6 **************************************************************** The Word of the Day for March 29 is: posthumous \PAHS-chuh-muss\ adjective 1 : born after the death of the father *2 : published after the death of the author 3 : following or occurring after death Example sentence: At the request of the Dickinson family, Mabel Loomis Todd was responsible for editing the first posthumous editions of the poems of Emily Dickinson. Did you know? The etymology of the word "posthumous" tells all. In Latin, "posterus" is an adjective meaning "coming after" (from "post," meaning "after"). The comparative form of "posterus" is "posterior," and its superlative form is "postumus," which means, among other things, "last." "Postumus" was used specifically of the last of a man's children, which in some cases meant those born after he died. Because of this special use, the "-umus" in the word was erroneously identified with "humus," meaning "earth" (as in the ground in which the unfortunate father now lay). The spelling in Latin became "posthumus," as if the word were formed from "post" and "humus," and both the "h" and the suggestion of "after burial" or "after death" carried over into English. *Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence. |
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