Word of the day: valence

The word of the day is valence:

Latin valentia; see valency n.(Show Less)

  

1. An extract or preparation (of some herb) used in medicine. Obs. 

2. Valour, courage; = valiance n. 1. Obs. 

3. Chem.   = valency n. 2.  

4. Psychol. Emotional force or significance, spec. the feeling of attraction or repulsion with which an individual invests an object or event. (OED)

"Next, Melissa Raines, who teaches at Liverpool University, gave a paper in which she examined the emotional valence of Eliot's punctuation and pointed out that Maggie's speech tends to devolve into dashes when she is most susceptible to the influence of Stephen Guest, her seducer, but maintains the discipline of periods, colons, and semicolons when her better nature is dominant.  Raines was a proofreader before she became an academic."

 - Rebecca Mead, "Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot teaches us", February 14 & 21, 2011, The New Yorker

I'm going with definition 4 here.