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"ethopoeia"
Definition: Putting oneself in place of another so as to both understand and express his or her feelings more vividly. (See Kenneth Burke's discussion of identification in A Rhetoric of Motives.) See also: Ethopoeia in George Orwell's "A Hanging."
Etymology:
From the Greek, "delineation of character"
Examples:
- "I felt very deeply his sorrow and his defeat. As things go in the animal kingdom, he is about my age, and when he lowered himself to creep under the bar, I could feel in my own bones his pain at bending so far."
(E. B. White, "The Geese")
- "This fellow and myself are like as two peas. The patterns of our lives are almost indistinguishable one from the other."
(E. B. White, "Khrushchev and I: A Study in Similarities")
- "I feel an extraordinary kinship with this aging statesman [Daniel Webster], this massive victim of pollinosis whose declining days sanctioned the sort of compromise that is born of local irritation. There is a fraternity of those who have been tried beyond endurance. I am closer to Daniel Webster, almost, than to my own flesh."
(E. B. White, "The Summer Catarrh")
Pronunciation: ee-tho-po-EE-ya
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