All 5 Uses
edify
in
Man And Superman
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- and the fact that we are much more curious about the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen.†
Chpt Ded.edify = instruct
- Byron was as little of a philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries.†
Chpt Ded.unedifying = not instructivestandard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unedifying means not and reverses the meaning of edifying. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
- I not only tell you that my hero wrote a revolutionists' handbook: I give you the handbook at full length for your edification if you care to read it.†
Chpt Ded. *edification = instruction
- And the ordinary citizen, knowing that an author who is well spoken of by a respectable newspaper must be all right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with undisturbed edification from his own point of view.†
Chpt Ded.
- English life seems to him to suffer from a lack of edifying rhetoric (which he calls moral tone); English behavior to show a want of respect for womanhood; English pronunciation to fail very vulgarly in tackling such words as world, girl, bird, etc.; English society to be plain spoken to an extent which stretches occasionally to intolerable coarseness; and English intercourse to need enlivening by games and stories and other pastimes; so he does not feel called upon to acquire these defects after taking great paths to cultivate himself in a first rate manner before venturing across the Atlantic.†
Chpt 2edifying = instructive
Definitions:
-
(1)
(edify) to instruct -- morally or intellectually
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)