Word of the Day

Saturday October 16, 2010

vivify [VIV-uh-fy]

transitive verb

To endue with life; to make alive; to animate.
To enliven; brighten.

Juxtaposing this gobbledygook with the chronicles of Ren and Toby, Atwood creates the novel's spookiest effect. Here is a world in which the reigning mythologies aren't just wrong-headed but have absolutely nothing to do with the real lives of those living in their shadows. And the coming plague only serves to vivify the advocates of these beliefs.

John Freeman, "Cackles on the edge of forever", Los Angeles Times, Sep 27, 2009
While Mariani rightly emphasizes Hopkins's spiritual and artistic life, he also includes the kind of human details that vivify a biography. The poet noted, "Three of my intimate friends at Oxford have . . . drowned themselves, a good many more of my acquaintances and contemporaries have died by their own hands in other ways."

Michael Dirda, "Hopkins worked out his salvation with fear and trembling -- and poetry", The Washington Post, Nov 2, 2008
So with all writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely in that spirit. What he cannot vivify he should omit.

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 - 1894) A Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. Familiar Studies of Men & Books (1882)

Origin of the Word

Vivify, approximately 1590, derives from Old French vivifier, from Late Latin vivificare "make alive, restore to life," from vivificus "enlivening," from Latin vivus "alive"+ root of facere "to make."