All 5 Uses of
aesthetic
in
The American Language, by Mencken
- The effects of this ceaseless traffic in ideas and impressions, so plainly visible in politics, in ethics and aesthetics, and even in the minutae of social intercourse, are also to be seen in the language.†
*aesthetics = related to beauty or good taste; or the study of what is beautiful or tastefulunconventional spelling: Aesthetics is the British spelling. Americans spell it esthetics.
- The American, even in the early eighteenth century, already showed many of the characteristics that were to set him off from the Englishman later on—his bold and somewhat grotesque imagination, his contempt for authority, his lack of aesthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor.†
aesthetic = beautiful, tasteful, or related to beauty or tasteunconventional spelling: This is the British spelling. Americans spell it esthetic.
- [15] Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more, were retired with blushes during the period of aesthetic consciousness following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own day, and are in good usage†
- The English objection to our simplifications, as Brander Matthews points out, is not wholly or even chiefly etymological; its roots lie, to borrow James Russell Lowell's phrase, in an esthetic hatred burning "with as fierce a flame as ever did theological hatred."†
esthetic = beautiful, tasteful, or related to beauty or taste
- [18] They also support the /ae/ in such words as /aetiology/, /aesthetics/, /mediaeval/ and /anaemia/, and the /oe/ in /oesophagus/, [Pg258] /manoeuvre/ and /diarrhoea/†
aesthetics = related to beauty or good taste; or the study of what is beautiful or tastefulunconventional spelling: Aesthetics is the British spelling. Americans spell it esthetics.
Definitions:
-
(1)
(aesthetic) related to beauty or good taste -- often referring to one's appreciation of beauty or one's sense of what is beautiful
or:
beautiful or tasteful -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
In Philosophy, "aesthetics" is the study of theories of what is beautiful.