Word of the Day:
ambivalence
What It Means
The coexistence of opposing attitudes or feelings (such as love and hate) towards a person, object or idea.
A state of uncertainty or indecisiveness.
Ambivalence in Context
“The great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism both fall under “allosemitism”: literally Othering the Jew. He defined it not as resentment of what is different, which is xenophobia, but rather of what defies order and clear categories. In 1997, he wrote, “The Jew...”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from German Ambivalenz (“simultaneous conflicting feelings”), from Latin ambi- (“both”) and valentia (“strength”), from the verb valere (“to be strong”) (see valiant); spelled on the model of French-origin words ending in -ence. The German term was coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1910; by 1929, it had taken on a broader literary and general sense. Equivalent to ambi- + valence.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: ambivalence (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “ambivalence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ambivalence. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
