Anodyne
adj. and noun.
As adjective: alleviating pain; soothing to the mind or feelings. As noun: something that calms or comforts; a medicine or drug that relieves pain.
From Greek, a conjugation of an- ”without” + odyne ”pain.” Odyne was the minor Greek Goddess of pain.
Now for all of the fanboys and cinemaphiles out there, you’re probably familiar with the word “Cyberdyne” from the Terminator series. Cyberdyne Systems Corporation was the company that developed Skynet, the network of artificially intelligent supercomputers that was designed to replace human beings control of military systems and almost immediately became self-aware and launched a nuclear attack. So, if you take the prefix “Cyber,” which is used to form words related to computers (and lately, the internet), but actually derives from a shortened form of the word “cybernetics,” the theory/science of communication and control in animals and machines, and you combine it with “dyne,” or pain, it appears that James Cameron constructed the word “cyberdyne” to loosely mean: “computer control of pain and suffering.” At any rate, I thought it was interesting.
Filed under: Word of the Day | Tagged: Cybernetics, James Cameron, The Terminator, Word of the Day
