APHORISM

[Dr. Goodword]

• aphorism •

Pronunciation: æ-fê-riz-êm • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: A pithy adage, a terse statement of a believed truth.

Notes: Oscar Wilde was an aphorist nonpareil. He constantly created amusing aphoristic phrases like, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." "Work is the curse of the drinking classes," is not a spoonerism, as sometimes thought, but yet another Wilde aphorism. The adjective is aphoristic and one can talk aphoristically.

In Play: Much of our lives and many of our attitudes are determined by aphorisms. It was not an American but the French writer Voltaire who originally said, "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it." Englishman Edmund Burke alerted us to the conditions for evil with, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Finally, it was Benjamin Franklin who warned us, long before the Bush wiretaps, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Word History: Today's Good Word came to us through French from Late Latin aphorismus, a word borrowed from Greek aphorismos. Aphorismos is the noun of aphorizein "to delimit, define". This verb is made up of apo- "(up)on" + horizein "to demarcate, define". As you might have guessed, the verb horizein also lies at the bottom of Greek horizon, the word referring to the boundary between the sky and earth, which English also borrowed, directly from Greek.

[gailr]

Contemporary aphorisms take two forms: the sound bite and the bumper sticker.
-gailr

[Bailey]

And taglines.

mark still-pithy-after-all-these-years Bailey

[scw1217]

This word reminds me of a certain preacher who is fond of speaking these. We have termed them "Norvelisms" by his first name. Every now and again, someone of us will hear a new one spoken somewhere and save it mentally to repeat it back to the others later. They are often to the effect of "If I am alive, then I'm not dead."

[portokalos]

The second synthetic is from the word ορίζω- ορισμός αφορίζω. The same for the horizon.
Ecclesiastically has the meaning to separate someone from the church.
Just I opened greek dictionaries.

[gailr]

The second synthetic is from the word ορίζω- ορισμός αφορίζω. The same for the horizon.
Ecclesiastically has the meaning to separate someone from the church.
Just I opened greek dictionaries.

I don't understand this; please expand on it further.
Thanks-
gailr

[portokalos]

OK. We are talking the same word. I confused with letter h-orizein like h-istory. We pronounce and read without h these words but with h the orismos became horismos χωρισμός =separetion a different word.
Good exegesis?