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
