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Tuesday, 16 July 2024

Nostalgia

Feeling sentimentality for the past


Nostalgia
Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. The word nostalgia is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), meaning "homecoming", a Homeric word, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning "pain", and was coined by a 17th-century medical student to describe the anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home. Described as a medical condition—a form of melancholy—in the early modern period, it became an important trope in Romanticism.

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