22 February 2015

woebegone

[woh-bi-gawn, -gon]

adjective
1. beset with woe; affected by woe, especially in appearance.
2. showing or indicating woe:
He always had a woebegone look on his face.

Origin
Middle English, Old English
1300-1350; Middle English wo begon orig., woe (has or had) surrounded (someone); wo woe + begon, past participle of begon, Old English begān to surround, besiege (see be-, go1)

Related forms
woebegoneness, noun

Synonyms
2. suffering, troubled, forlorn, gloomy.

Dictionary.com

Examples from the web for woebegone
– Redemption for the poem’s woebegone mariner comes when he embraces all life, no matter how lowly.
– Reasons and results couldn’t be worse than the woebegone state of expression to which human discord has devolved.
– Woebegone wooden houses, many of them falling down, dot the hillsides along the road.

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Today’s aphorism

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

– Boris Pasternak

On this day

22 February 1512 – Death of Amerigo Vespucci in Seville, Spain. Italian explorer, financier, navigator and cartographer. Vespucci believed that Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the ‘New World’ or ‘East Asia’ (now known as the Bahamas) and the land mass beyond it, was not part of Asia, but a separate ‘super-continent’. America is named after Vespucci. Born 9 March 1454 in Florence, Italy.

22 February 1962 – birth of Steve Irwin, ‘The Crocodile Hunter’, Australian wildlife expert and television personality. (Died 4 September 2006).

22 February 1987 – death of Andy Warhol, American pop artist.