saturnalia
See also: Saturnalia
English
WOTD – 1 January 2007
Etymology
From Latin Sāturnālia, a festival of the winter solstice.
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˌsætəˈneɪli.ə/
- (US) IPA(key): /ˌsætɚˈneɪli.ə/, /ˌsætɚˈneɪljə/
Audio (US) (file)
Noun
saturnalia (plural saturnalias)
- A period or occasion of general license, in which the passions or vices have riotous indulgence; a period of unrestrained revelry.
- 1842, [anonymous collaborator of Letitia Elizabeth Landon], chapter LXX, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], OCLC 1000392275, page 260:
- a man who mounts the Hustings, must not allow himself to be sore-boned, or he invites his opponents to 'touch him on the raw,' not in the exercise of their malice, but their power; an election is a saturnalia."
- 1905, Upton Sinclair, chapter XXVI, in The Jungle, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 26 February 1906, OCLC 1150866071:
- They lodged men and women on the same floor; and with the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery—scenes such as never before had been witnessed in America.
- 1922, James Frazer, chapter 14, in The Golden Bough:
- If at the birth of the Latin kings their fathers were really unknown, the fact points either to a general looseness of life in the royal family or to a special relaxation of moral rules on certain occasions, when men and women reverted for a season to the licence of an earlier age. Such Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social evolution.
- 1922, Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood: His Odyssy, ch XXVIII
- Yet if he remained, it would simply mean that his own and Hagthorpe's crews would join in the saturnalia and increase the hideousness of events now inevitable.
- 1961, Joseph Heller, chapter 34, in Catch-22:
- It was a raw, violent, guzzling saturnalia that spilled obstreperously through the woods to the officers' club and spread up into the hills toward the hospital and the antiaircraft-gun emplacements.
- 2001, Chip Kidd, The Cheese Monkeys:
- We advanced into the main hall, already aroar with a saturnalia of sozzled gestures and gibbering.
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Related terms
- Saturn
- saturnalian
- saturnian
Translations
unrestrained revelry
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See also
- bacchanalia
- dionysia
Anagrams
- Australian