From: P.M. Hansell (pmh22@cus.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 10:36:03 EST
> David, according to my AHED online dictionary, "utopia" comes from OU "not"
> + TOPOS "place', so what you read was right. The reason for the negative
> prefix is that Utopia was so far beyond the ideal that it was an imaginary
> place (a place that didn't exist). In English the word has picked up some
> positive connotations, so you now have the send of "good" in there, wanting
> the prefix to be EU instead of OU.
This is probably off-topic, but Sir Thomas More first coined this
word in his work 'utopia' in c1515? He was sufficiently proficient in
Greek to retain the ambiguity between EU and OU and so his presentation of
the ideal human world is both ironically a good-place and a no-place. It
has a satirical force.
Peter Hansell
>
> Wayne
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