Word of the Day

Thursday October 29, 2009

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didactic [dy-DAK-tik; duh-]

adjective

1. Fitted or intended to teach; conveying instruction; teaching some moral lesson; as, didactic essays.
2. Adapted to teach; instructive, especially excessively.

• About 1 in 10 of New York's public-school students are uninsured, making school nurses, their didactic posters and the annual personal hygiene assemblies their main -- or perhaps only -- sources of health advice and care. Sometimes, nurses must also be counselors, and visits to Nurse Akhtar occasionally take on elements of a therapy session.
  Javier C. Hernandez, "Making It Better", New York Times, Oct 18, 2009
• Prof. Martin is not didactic. He doesn't announce the answer. Rather, he provides clues. One of them is the enormous increase that took place in the size of government since the 1950s - and most specifically in the 1970s. In 1900, government commanded 10 per cent of Canadian GDP; by 1950, it commanded 25 per cent; by 1980, it commanded almost 40 per cent.
  Neil Reynolds, "An economy handcuffed by government", The Globe and Mail, Oct 7, 2009
• The young prince Hamlet was not happy at Elsinore. It was not because he missed the gay student-life of Wittenberg, and that the little Danish court was intolerably dull. It was not because the didactic lord chamberlain bored him with long speeches, or that the lord chamberlain's daughter was become a shade wearisome.
  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836 - 1907) An American poet and novelist . A Midnight Fantasy (1873)

Origin of the Word

Didactic, approximately 1658, derives from French didactique, from Greek didaktikos "apt at teaching," from didaktos "taught," from didaskein "teach."