Word of the Day

Did You Know?

Once more without feeling! While its siblings antipathy, sympathy, and empathy refer to often strong emotions, whether tender or terrible, apathy is unconcerned with all that. Whether one is feeling blasé, indifferent, or—to use a more recent coinage—meh, apathy is the perfect word for such a lack of passion. At the root of apathy and its kin is páthos, a Greek word meaning “experience, misfortune, or emotion,” which led first to the adjective apathḗs (“not suffering, without passion or feeling, impassive”) and then the noun apatheîa before passing through Latin and Middle French on its way to English. The prefix a- in both means “without.” The other aforementioned páthos descendants are, of course, supplied with their own prefixes that give clues to their respective meanings: anti- (“opposite”), sym- (“at the same time”), and em- (“in” or “within”).