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Wanton and dissipation
Aug. 27th, 2025 02:51 pmThem: If you’re familiar with the meanings of wanton and dissipation, could you please describe them in a way that will help me never confuse them with other words or forget their meaning?
Me: Oh, there is no way the comments to this post are going to be helpful.
And I was half right! I was just about the only person to give the asked-for definition of "dissipation". As predicted, everybody else used the science sense rather than the moral decay sense. What surprised me is that they also all defined the word "wanton" in terms of violence rather than sexual promiscuity.
Anyway, I said myself that dissipation (meaning debauchery) is an old-fashioned term and that I'm not quite sure how I even know that one off the top of my head, but then the next day I was re-reading Ancillary Justice and there it is, right in the first few chapters. Seivarden is in a bad state due to her dissipated lifestyle, and that's the word used to describe it. Huh. (But I think I already knew that word before I read the book for the first time.)
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Me: Oh, there is no way the comments to this post are going to be helpful.
And I was half right! I was just about the only person to give the asked-for definition of "dissipation". As predicted, everybody else used the science sense rather than the moral decay sense. What surprised me is that they also all defined the word "wanton" in terms of violence rather than sexual promiscuity.
Anyway, I said myself that dissipation (meaning debauchery) is an old-fashioned term and that I'm not quite sure how I even know that one off the top of my head, but then the next day I was re-reading Ancillary Justice and there it is, right in the first few chapters. Seivarden is in a bad state due to her dissipated lifestyle, and that's the word used to describe it. Huh. (But I think I already knew that word before I read the book for the first time.)
( Read more... )
