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Friday, 10 July 2015

Word To Think About Today: goya



We know about Goya the painter:

Vicente López Portaña - el pintor Francisco de Goya.jpg
That's Francisco Goya by Vicente Lopez y Portaña. Doesn't Goya look amazingly tidy and respectable?

But today's goya is different. 

Goya is an Urdu word (Urdu is the national language of Pakistan. It's also used in parts of India). It describes a daydream that seems real at the time, but it can also describe what the poet Coleridge called suspension of disbelief. That's what happens, with any luck, when you're consuming something fictional and you happily forget for the moment that it's not really happening.

Suspension of disbelief is a good phrase, but a rather negative one. It makes a reader of novels or a watcher of films seem a bit gullible - or a bit of a madman, perhaps.

But goya...that's more like it: a willing step into another world.

Yep. It's a useful idea, is goya.

Word To Use Today: goya. As I said, it's from Urdu. It means, literally, as if, or as though, or as it were.




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