Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past.
- noun The condition of being homesick; homesickness.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Morbid longing to return to one's home or native country; homesickness, especially in its severe forms, producing derangement of mental and physical functions.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Med.) Homesickness; esp., a severe and sometimes fatal form of melancholia, due to homesickness.
- noun A sentimental yearning to return to an earlier time remembered as happier or more pleasant, or a former place evoking happy memories; a longing to experience again a former happy time.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
longing forhome orfamiliar surroundings ;homesickness . - noun A
bittersweet yearning for the things of thepast . - noun Reminiscence of the speaker's
childhood or younger years.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun longing for something past
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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While acknowledging that indulging in nostalgia is itself a separate realm of lameness, let me ask, Which is lamer: being too young to remember a given period and then getting the nostalgia wrong, or not being too young but having been so out of touch with popular culture that subsequent attempts at nostalgia are woefully inaccurate?
Agnostalgia 2008
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Glenn Beck and the Tea Party represent a very vocal minority, so worked up about the direction of our nation that they'll pour into Washington by the hundreds of thousands to worship at the feet of a religious revivalism rooted in nostalgia for a white-washed version of America that never was.
Sally Kohn: One Nation March: Sometimes Size Doesn't Matter Sally Kohn 2010
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Glenn Beck and the Tea Party represent a very vocal minority, so worked up about the direction of our nation that they'll pour into Washington by the hundreds of thousands to worship at the feet of a religious revivalism rooted in nostalgia for a white-washed version of America that never was.
Sally Kohn: One Nation March: Sometimes Size Doesn't Matter Sally Kohn 2010
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Glenn Beck and the Tea Party represent a very vocal minority, so worked up about the direction of our nation that they'll pour into Washington by the hundreds of thousands to worship at the feet of a religious revivalism rooted in nostalgia for a white-washed version of America that never was.
Sally Kohn: One Nation March: Sometimes Size Doesn't Matter Sally Kohn 2010
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Glenn Beck and the Tea Party represent a very vocal minority, so worked up about the direction of our nation that they'll pour into Washington by the hundreds of thousands to worship at the feet of a religious revivalism rooted in nostalgia for a white-washed version of America that never was.
Sally Kohn: One Nation March: Sometimes Size Doesn't Matter Sally Kohn 2010
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Glenn Beck and the Tea Party represent a very vocal minority, so worked up about the direction of our nation that they'll pour into Washington by the hundreds of thousands to worship at the feet of a religious revivalism rooted in nostalgia for a white-washed version of America that never was.
Sally Kohn: One Nation March: Sometimes Size Doesn't Matter Sally Kohn 2010
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As the descriptions of Brewer, that "torpid hive," or any look at Updike's writings would suggest, this nostalgia is inevitably complicated by darker realities.
Keystone to Updike's Imagination Anthony Paletta 2010
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Glenn Beck and the Tea Party represent a very vocal minority, so worked up about the direction of our nation that they'll pour into Washington by the hundreds of thousands to worship at the feet of a religious revivalism rooted in nostalgia for a white-washed version of America that never was.
Sally Kohn: One Nation March: Sometimes Size Doesn't Matter Sally Kohn 2010
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The nostalgia is unconscious, flickering through only in the shape of a lone apricot tree on an embankment, so foreign in Berlin's northern latitudes.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 - Presentation Speech 2009
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Glenn Beck and the Tea Party represent a very vocal minority, so worked up about the direction of our nation that they'll pour into Washington by the hundreds of thousands to worship at the feet of a religious revivalism rooted in nostalgia for a white-washed version of America that never was.
Sally Kohn: One Nation March: Sometimes Size Doesn't Matter Sally Kohn 2010
peacoat commented on the word nostalgia
From the Greek nostos meaning return, and algos meaning suffering. "The suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return." --Milan Kundera, Ignorance
December 8, 2006
sonofgroucho commented on the word nostalgia
Ain't what it used to be.
October 1, 2007
leforet commented on the word nostalgia
“In Greek ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twing in your heart far more powerful than memory alone�?
— Don Draper
August 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word nostalgia
Kundera 1, Draper 0. Greek nostos "return, homeward journey", related to nosteô "go home, come home", and ne-, nei- "go, come" (with regular omission of medial /s/). First used in English (1756) as a translation of German Heimweh; the English 'homesickness' was also first used in this translation.
August 5, 2008
kewpid commented on the word nostalgia
Mr. Draper may be wrong, but he knows how to pluck at the heartstrings:
Carousel
November 12, 2008
frindley commented on the word nostalgia
Nostalgia is: looking fondly over my old Wordie lists.
January 28, 2010
marky commented on the word nostalgia
This is my word of the week. Nostalgia
February 4, 2010