Word of the Day

: March 27, 2010

esemplastic

adjective es-em-PLAS-tik

What It Means

: shaping or having the power to shape disparate things into a unified whole

esemplastic in Context

"The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esemplastic power of his imagination -- he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself…." (Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel)

Did You Know?

"Unusual and new-coined words are, doubtless, an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater," wrote English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, 1817. True to form, in that same work, he assembled "esemplastic" by melding the Greek phrase "es hen," meaning "into one," with "plastic" to fulfill his need for a word that accurately described the imagination's ability to shape disparate experiences into a unified whole (e.g., the poet's imaginative ability to communicate a variety of images, sensations, emotions, and experiences in the unifying framework of a poem). The verb "intensify" was another word that Coleridge was compelled to mint while writing Biographia. Coinages found in his other writings include "clerisy" and "psychosomatic," among others.