Today’s word of the day, thanks to Wordsmith.org’s A_Word_A_Day email, is neophilia. The email says that this noun means “The love of what’s new or novel.” Dictionary.com defines it as “a tendency to like anything new; love of novelty” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/neophilia). Yourdictionary.com defines it as “Love of new things” (https://www.yourdictionary.com/neophilia).

Merriam-Webster, whose definition is almost identical to Wordsmith.org’s, but then it adds this: “The earliest known example of neophilia in print is from an 1899 issue of Political Science Quarterly, a publication of Columbia University. The word is a combination of the Greek-derived combining forms neo-, meaning ‘new,’ and -philia, meaning ‘liking for.’ In the 1930s, the form neophily was introduced as a synonym of neophilia, but no neophilia could save it from obscurity-it has never caught on. The opposite of neophilia is neophobia, meaning ‘a dread of or aversion to novelty.’ It has been around slightly longer than neophilia, having first appeared in 1886” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/neophilia). It is pronounced / (ˌniːəʊˈfɪlɪə) /; the comma-looking mark before ni indicates a secondary stress, while the primary stress is on the third syllable, indicated by the apostrophe before it. The colon-looking mark after ni indicates that the vowel i (pronounced like the vowel sound in beet) is long, drawn out a little bit rather than cut off quickly. I couldn’t find a pronunciation for neophily, but I would imagine that it would pronounced / (ni’afɪli) /, with the stress on the second syllable and no stress on the first syllable.

By the way, if you are interested in the International Phonetic Alphabet, you can find more information about it at https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/.

On this date every year, my mind goes to T. S. Eliot, which is not a bad place to go, though the reason for it is perhaps a bit silly.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, MO, on September 26, 1888, to a well-off, even prominent family. His grandfather had moved from New England to start a Unitarian Church in St. Louis. His father was the president of a brick company, and his mother was a social worker. As a boy, Eliot had a health condition that prevented him from playing sports and other physical activities, so he developed a love of reading.

He went to a preparatory school in Massachusetts for a year before attending Harvard College from 1906 to 1910, finishing with a bachelor’s and a master’s in literature. “Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot’s undergraduate career was in 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature. This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot’s life” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot).

In 1910, he moved to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne—philosophy and poetry. Then he went back to Harvard to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. In 1914, he received a scholarship to study at Oxford in England, but he didn’t really like Oxford, so he spent a lot of his time in London (London and Oxford are not really very far apart, and England has a good train system that makes it easy to travel from one to the other—I once lost a piece of luggage at the Oxford train station). It was during this time that he met two people who had a profound influence on his adult life, Ezra Pound, the American poet, and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom he married, though the marriage proved an unhappy one.

Eliot’s most famous poem is “The Love Son of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem which has bedeviled college students for a hundred years. But the poem that has been the most influential, at least on the intellectual class, is “The Waste Land,” which is a somewhat dark and despairing poem. It begins,

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Of course, given that April in the USA is when we have to submit taxes for the previous year’s income, the notion that April is the cruellest month seems fitting, although, as I said, a bit silly.

After this dark period in Eliot’s life, a period which included the First World War, Eliot went through a kind of transformation. In 1927, he converted from Unitarianism to the Anglican Church, the Church of England. He also became a British citizen.

I think his best poem is one that gets less attention than “Prufrock” or “The Waste Land.” It’s called The Four Quartets. And my favorite lines from that poem come from the last section, called “Little Gidding.” The “title refers to a small Anglican community in Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, established by Nicholas Ferrar in the 17th century and scattered during the English Civil War” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Gidding_(poem)). Here are the lines:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

What I love about these lines is that Eliot confirms the need to explore, intellectually as well as in other ways, but also confirms that it’s okay if our exploration takes us back home, the place where we started. But in returning to those roots, we have to know it for ourselves. Many of us take our beliefs from our parents or grandparents and never challenge them or explore others. When we do that, we never have the opportunity to make our believes our own—they are always an inheritance. Others suffer from neophilia, believing anything new as if the old things have nothing to offer.

The image today is “The Starnberger See near Munich with the Alps in the background” (https://www.germansights.com/bavaria/starnberger-see.php). I chose it because the lake appears in lines in “The Waste Land”: “Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain.”