Definitive Jest

Entry: neurasthenic (adj.)


In context: "It's surely been spelled out already that prorectors teach only one marginal class per term and serve as on-court assistants to Schtitt's Lebensgefährtin Aubrey deLint, and that their existence at E.T.A. is marginal and low-prestige and their spiritual state on the low continuum between embittered and accepting, and for many of the more neurasthenic E.T.A. students the prorectors are kind of repellent the way hideously old people are repellent, reminding the students of the kind of low-prestige purgatorial fate that awaits the marginal and low-ranked jr. player; and while a couple of the prorectors are feared, none of them is all that much respected, and they're avoided, and stick together with one another and keep to themselves and seem on the whole sad, with that grad-schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and reality-avoidance about them."

Definition:   Of the nature of or characteristic of neurasthenia; affected or caused by neurasthenia.

Neurasthenia (n.):   A disorder characterized by feelings of fatigue and lassitude, with vague physical symptoms such as headache, muscle pain, and subjective sensory disturbances, originally attributed to weakness or exhaustion of the nerves and later considered a form of neurotic disorder.

Other: One of my favorite set of extensions in Scrabble is STHENIA -> ASTHENIA -> MYASTHENIAS.


Also "grad-schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and reality-avoidance about them" is a sentence I should have read and considered part-way through my too-long tenure as a grad student.

SNOOT score: 2

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Source: Oxford English Dictionary