Saturday 26 August 2017

Aspheterized (August)



Coleridge dreams, in a letter to Southey (1794), of a time when “the pure system of pantisocracy shall have aspheterized.” He explains this coinage as the joining of two Greek words that mean no private property and that “we really wanted such a word.” We did? Googling ‘aspheterized’ this August all meaningful hits refer back to Coleridge. Scrabble Word Solver states: ‘No definition available’. During the French Revolution our would-be communists pant for their pantisocracy, a system of government of their own invention, where all rule equally. But they couldn’t agree on a location. Susquehanna? Wales? Their utopian plans collapsed.

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