Definition:
a collapse (as of a society or regime) marked by catastrophic violence and disorder .
Description:
Norse mythology specified that the destruction of the world would be preceded by a cataclysmic final battle between the good and evil gods, resulting in the heroic deaths of all the ‘good guys.’ The German word for this earth-shattering last battle was ‘Götterdämmerung .’ Literally, ‘götterdämmerung ‘ means ‘twilight of the gods’ (‘Götter’ is the plural of ‘Gott,’ ‘god,’ and ‘Dämmerung ‘ means ‘twilight’). Figuratively, the term is extended to situations of world-altering destruction marked by extreme chaos and violence. In the 19th century, the German composer Richard Wagner brought attention to the word ‘Gotterdammerung’ when he chose it as the title of the last opera of his cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, and by the early 20th century, the word had entered English.
Source:
Merriam Webster Dictionary
Mar 04
adminLeisure, Life alcohol, british, english, french, german
Definition:
To engage in boisterous, drunken merrymaking.
Description:
16th-century English revelers toasting each other’s health sometimes drank a brimming mug of spirits straight to the bottom — drinking ‘all-out,’ they called it.
German tipplers did the same and used the German expression for ‘all out’ — ‘gar aus.’
The French adopted the German term as ‘carous,’ using the adverb in their expression ‘boire (to drink) carous,’ and that phrase, with its idiomatic sense of ‘to empty the cup,’ led to ‘carrousse,’ a French noun meaning ‘a large draft of liquor.’
And that’s where English speakers picked up ‘carouse’ in the mid-1500s, first as a noun (which later took on the sense of a general ‘drinking bout’), and then as a verb meaning ‘to drink freely.’
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