After beating a dead centaur yesterday, Dictionary.com's word of the day for today seems quite appropriate:
chimerical \ky-MER-ih-kuhl; -MIR-; kih-\, adjective:
1. Merely imaginary; produced by or as if by a wildly fanciful imagination; fantastic; improbable or unrealistic.
2. Given to or indulging in unrealistic fantasies or fantastic schemes.
I would have thought chimerical meant part one thing and part another -- you know, a chimera. I guess not.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
"It's a miracle!"
How many times have you heard that one, usually invoked when someone survives serious injuries that would kill most people? Personally, the use of the word grates on me and did even when I was a lot more religious than I am now. Yesterday, it grated on me when I saw this story:…
This is not a "cute" story. It's an infuriating story about a school climate gone mad. And, although I suspect an organizational psychologist could give a nuanced analysis of the situation, that's not my area of expertise, so I'm just going to tell the story.
Elder offspring was sent to the Vice…
This is the first, and I hope the last, time I come anywhere near defending Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, but I want to make a more general point so I'll swallow hard and do it. This is about his supposed gaffe wherein he seems to think Iraq and Pakistan share a border:
D[iane] S[…
To the ancient Greeks, a chimera was a kind of monster, with the body of a goat, the tail of a dragon, and a lion's head. To geneticists, a chimera can be an animal that's derived from two embryos, such as a transgenic mouse. Or if the organism is a plant, it can be a plant with a graft. We have…
Scrolling just a bit futher down the first page you referenced finds ...
The two definitions given are pretty obvious generalizations from the original , I'd say ...
Main Entry: chi·mer·i·cal
Variant(s): or chi·mer·ic \-rik, -emacronk\; or chi·me·ral \-mirschwal, -memacron-\
Function: adjective
Etymology: chimera + -ic, -ical, or -al
1 : being, relating to, or like a chimera ; especially : unreal and existing only as the product of wild unrestrained imagination
2 : inclined to or indicative of unrestrained imagination : UNREALISTIC
3 usually chimeral or chimeric : of, relating to, or being a chimera
synonym see IMAGINARY
"chimerical." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (7 Jan. 2007).
I was previewing and didn't manage to get my comment in, which is that it looks as if "chimerical" has diverged, and "chimeric/chimeral" are the adjectives mainly used for "related to a chimera".