daymare

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 3, 2009 is: daymare • \DAY-mair\ • noun : a nightmarish fantasy experienced while awake Examples: Through therapy, the patient has begun to experience some relief from the daymares she's been having since the traumatic event. Did you know? Long ago, the word "nightmare" designated an evil spirit that made its victims feel like they were suffocating in their sleep (prompting physician-botanist William Turner to introduce "a good remedy agaynst the stranglyng of the nyght mare" in 1562). By the early 1700s, the Age of Reason had arrived, nightmares were bad dreams, and "daymare" was a logically analogous choice when English speakers sought a word for a frightening and uncontrollable fantasy, a run-away daydream. And since the 1800s, when Charles Dickens wrote "a monstrous load that I was obliged to bear, a daymare that there was no possibility of breaking in, a weight that brooded on my wits" in David Copperfield, we’ve been using "daymare" figuratively. For example, today we might refer to "a logistical daymare." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.