Word of the Day
: October 24, 2012demiurge
playWhat It Means
: one that is an autonomous creative force or decisive power
demiurge in Context
The powerfully talented singer-songwriter-producer has been described by at least one music-industry insider as a "demiurge."
"A noisy group of video-game critics and theoreticians laments the rise of story in games. Games, in one version of this view, are best exemplified as total play, wherein the player is an immaterial demiurge and the only 'narrative' is what is anecdotally generated during play." - From Tom Bissell's 2011 book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
Did You Know?
In the Platonic school of philosophy, the Demiurge is a deity who fashions the physical world in the light of eternal ideas. In the Timaeus, Plato credits the Demiurge with taking preexisting materials of chaos and arranging them in accordance with the models of eternal forms. Nowadays the word "demiurge" can refer to the individual or group chiefly responsible for a creative idea, as in "the demiurge behind the new hit TV show." "Demiurge" derives via Late Latin from Greek "dēmiourgos," meaning "artisan" or "one with special skill." The "demi-" part of the word comes from the Greek noun "dēmos," meaning "people"; the second part comes from the word for worker, "ergon."
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What former Word of the Day begins with "k" and can mean "something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality"? The answer is ...
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