eunoia

Noun

eunoia (uncountable)

1. (rhetoric) Goodwill towards an audience, either perceived or real; the perception that the speaker has the audience's interest at heart.
   • Yea the Apostle himself in the forecited 2 Cor. 6.14. alludes from that place of Deut. to forbid mis-yoking mariage; as by the Greek word is evident, though he instance but in one example of mis-matching with an Infidell: yet next to that what can be a fouler incongruity, a greater violence to the...1643, John Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
   • Direct argument is a dangerous strategy for developing eunoia, since "those who have many friends and treat everyone as close to them seem to be friends to no one, except in a fellow-citizens way. These people are regarded as ingratiating."1994, Eugene Garver, Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character, page 112
2. A state of normal adult mental health.
   • The author says if we translate this metopic or coronal curve into the language of psychology we have eunoia or prothymia.1899, Editorial Comment: "A New Faculty and its Localization", Medicine 5: 584
   • We can usually tell which baby at three months old will never reach even imbecility, which child at three will never reach morinoia, habits of life, which boy or girl at six or seven will be arrested in morinoia and not proceed into eunoia.1912, William Eastbrook Chancellor, "Temperment and the Education of Foreigners and of Their Children for American Citizenship", Educational Foundations 39 (1)