Word of the day: Aufseherin

The word of the day is Aufseherin:

"Of the 55,000 guards who served in Nazi concentration camps, about 3,700 were women.^{[citation needed]} In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a guard shortage.
The German title for this position, Aufseherin (plural Aufseherinnen) means female overseer or attendant."

 - Wikipedia


"The ultimate ambiguity of the plot is that we cannot be sure if Lisa really sees Marta on the ship.  The Aufseherin may be hallucinating, her mind corroded by guilt and fear."

 - Alex Ross, "Testament: Recovering a Holocaust opera by Mieczysław Weinberg", 5 September 2011 The New Yorker

Word of the day: chaconne

The word of the day is chaconne:

Etymology:  < French chaconne, < Spanish chacona, according to Spanish etymologists, < Basque chucun pretty.

Music.

 

An obsolete dance, or the music to which it was danced, moderately slow, and usually in 3–4 time. (OED)

 

Wikipedia (and they wouldn't lie to me) goes into a little more detail: "A chaconne (French pronunciation: [ʃaˈkɔn]; Italian: ciaccona) is a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line (ground bass) which offered a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention."

"Only the chaconne climax falls short: it seems a bit blatant."

 - Alex Ross, "Testament: Recovering a Holocaust opera by Mieczysław Weinberg", 5 September 2011 The New Yorker

Word of the day: epigone

The word of the day is epigone:

Etymology:  In pl. < French épigones, < Latin epigonī, < Greek ἐπίγονοι, plural of ἐπίγονος born afterwards, < ἐπί upon, after + -γονος, < root of γίγνεσθαι to be born. The designation οἱ ἐπίγονοι (Latin Epigoni) was applied especially to the sons of the seven heroes who led the war against Thebes; the mod. use is in allusion to this.

rare.

One of a succeeding generation. Chiefly in pl. the less distinguished successors of an illustrious generation.  (OED)

"The first impression is of an epigone.  So I thought for years, listening to the few Weinberg recordings that came my way.  Recently, though, I became entranced by a disk of the 1944 Piano Quintet, by the ARC Ensemble, and began to perceive the subtle ways in which Weinberg stands apart from his hero."

 - Alex Ross, "Testament: Recovering a Holocaust opera by Mieczysław Weinberg", 5 September 2011 The New Yorker