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accismus

By , About.com Guide

Definition:

Coyness: a form of irony in which a person feigns a lack of interest in something that he or she actually desires.

Etymology:

From the Greek, "coyness"

Examples and Observations:

  • "Accismus is . . . a form of irony where one pretends indifference and refuses something while actually wanting it. In Aesop's fable, the fox pretends he doesn't care for the grapes."
    (Anu Garg at Wordsmith.org)


  • "My name is Elizabeth Urello. I currently live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I do not desire to be a writer/actor/comic/playwright/household name/superstar-personality, any more than I desire your good opinion. I do not desperately want more friends, and I am not badly in need of dates."
    ("About Elizabeth," at the blog Accismus)


  • ". . . I saw Mark Antony offer him [Julius Caesar] a crown--yet 'twas not a crown neither, 'twas one of these coronets--and as I told you, he put it by once; but, for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again; but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time; he put it the third time by; and still as he refused it, the rabblement hooted and clapped their chapped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps . . .."
    (Casca in Act 1, scene 2 of Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare)


  • "The purer the golden vessel, the more readily is it bent: the higher worth of women is sooner lost than that of men. . . .

    "Nature herself has surrounded these delicate souls with an ever-present, in-born guard, with modesty, both in speaking and hearing. A woman requires no figure of eloquence--herself excepted--so often as that of accismus.*

    "* So rhetoricians term the figure by which one speaks, without all longing, of the very objects for which one feels the strongest."
    (Jean Paul, Levana: Or, The Doctrine of Education, Longman, 1848)
Pronunciation: ak-IZ-mus

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