Georgics on my Mind: Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

georgic \JOR-jik\ adjective

: of or relating to agriculture

Example sentence:
"Lanford Wilson has created yet another remarkable play... a fascinating tale of a georgic Midwestern community and the secrets lurking beneath the surface of its bucolic hum." (Adweek, March 25, 2004)

Did you know?
The adjective "georgic," which dates from the first half of the 18th century, derives by way of Latin "georgicus" and Greek "geōrgikos" from the Greek noun "geōrgos," meaning "farmer." That noun, in turn, was formed by a combination of the prefix "geō-" (meaning "earth") and "ergon" ("work"), the latter of which gave us words such as "allergy" and "ergonomics." The noun sense of "georgic," which dates from the early 16th century, refers to a poem that deals with the practical aspects of agriculture and rural affairs. The standard for such poems, Virgil's Georgics, is responsible for its name. The poem, written between 37 and 30 B.C., called for a restoration of agricultural life in Italy after its farms fell into neglect during civil war.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Life Imitates Art

Toward the beginning of Henry James' story 'The Last of the Valerii', we read this description from the story's narrator, who is a painter, of his American goddaughter's Roman husband-to-be:

'Strong the Conte Valerio certainly was; he had a head and throat like some of the busts in the Vatican. To my eye, which has looked at things now so long with the painter's purpose, it was a real perplexity to see such a throat rising out of the whit cravat of the period. It sustained a head as massively round as that of the familiar bust of the Emperor Caracalla and covered with the same dense sculptural crop of curls. The young man's hair grew superbly; it was such hair as the old Romans must have had when they walked bareheaded and bronzed about the world.'

On the Development of Philology

'Now that the defining of the philological activity has removed the one-sided ideas of it, the sole remaining task is to show how these ideas have arisen. They are easily accounted for through the division into separate elements of the definition just now established. Since the most usual vehicle of knowledge--rather, the pure reproduction of all knowledge--is speech, the first task of philology is to fathom the mystery of speech. The deepest and most illimitable human undertaking is the comprehension of speech in its freedom and necessity, and whoever has such knowledge has come to know all human knowledge.'

--August Boeckh, On Interpretation and Criticism, p. 10 (tr. John Paul Pritchard)

Discuss.