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a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) This is an awesome typo. "Utopia" is a transliteration from Ancient Greek meaning "No place." The same rules of translit
by tessierashpool 12y ago
a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic)
This is an awesome typo. "Utopia" is a transliteration from Ancient Greek meaning "No place." The same rules of transliteration would make "eutopia" mean "good place."
"Utopia" came into English through a satire, the meaning being that nowhere's really paradise, but today we mostly use it without that edge, i.e., as if it really were spelled "eutopia."
- tricolon 12y agoI don't think that's a typo. I think pluma added (sic) to point out that he spelt it differently on purpose, not that he's quoting someone verbatim. But thank you for teaching me about eutopia!
- joshuacc 12y agoFYI, St. Thomas More, who coined the term Utopia, seems to have been intentionally ambiguous about whether the term was a transliteration of eutopia (good place) and outopia (no place).
- tessierashpool 12y agoah, my bad, I think you're right.
- pluma 12y agoI wished I could say I coined that term, but I've seen it before. It's sometimes used in literary studies to explicitly distance a positive utopia from a dystopia. That it's a homophone makes it a clever pun, but also pretty useless in normal conversation.