MW Sunday's Word of the Day

[ruarri]

weltschmerz \VELT-shmairts\ noun, often capitalized

Comments

[buhrger]

depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state
you know that i blush when you talk about me, right?

[ruarri]

Can a person tell if you are blushing thorugh yur beard?

[buhrger]

you'll just have to try to make me blush the next time that we're in the same room. (friday evening?)

[ruarri]

I'll be there but there will be no bells on my costume. I may have to enlist some help on the blushing part.

[mort_q]

*1 : a mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state

Sounds like a definition for humour I've read.

Hmmmmmm.

[mort_q]

It's a George Santayana quote, but I can't find the whole thing online anywhere... my google-skillz are gone it seems.

It starts:

"The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be."

Wow, you must be really having a bad day

[ruarri]

if your goo-fu is that weak. :(

Santayana on Dickens

[mort_q]

He was the perfect comedian. When people say Dickens exaggerates, it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They probably have only notions of what things and people are; they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value. Their minds run on in the region of discourse, where there are masks only and no faces, ideas and no facts; they have little sense for those living grimaces that play from moment to moment upon the countenance of the world. The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at everv moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. But as it nevertheless intends all the time to be something different and highly dignified, at the next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover up the absurd thing it was, so that a conventional world, a world of masks, is superimposed on the realitv, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the realitv itself. Humour is the perception of this illusion, the fact allowed to pierce here and there through the convention, whilst the