Very important French & Latin Terms

 Very important French & Latin Terms 

Fin de siècle:  This French term denotes the end of a century, especially that of the 19th century with its phenomena of cultural anxiety in the face of an apocalyptic sense of an old era ending before World War I and the mood of transition. 

An important example can be Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush that captures the sense of uncertainty, gloom and the contrasting note of resilience. The Scream (1893), an expressionist painting by Edvard Munch, is a prominent cultural symbol of the fin de siècle era.

Ubi sunt : Derived from the Latin phrase Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? The ubi sunt convention is a rhetorical device that poses a series of questions about the fate or whereabouts of people or things from the past to emphasize their disappearance and the passage of time. In John Keats’ Ode to Autumn, the question, "Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” is an example of ubi sunt. 

Memento mori: This Latin phrase meaning "remember you must die," is a profound concept of reminding people of life's brevity and the inevitability of death to encourage living meaningfully.

George Herbert’s metaphysical poem Virtue is an example of memento mori where sweet day, sweet rose, sweet spring all are reminded of their death despite the sweetness and beauty they possess. 

Carpe diem: A Latin phrase meaning "seize the day," that is to urge people to make the most of the present moment  without excessive worry for the future. This concept has its origin in Horatian Odes. 

Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress is an example of Carpe diem. 

Deux ex machina : This Latin phrase denotes "God from the machine” when a sudden unexpected positive change occurs through a person (God or Godlike figure) or an incident that resolves an apparently unresolvable problem. 

Example includes the arrival of Hymen, the Goddess of marriage, that united all the couples in Shakespeare's As You Like It. In David Copperfield, Micawber  exposed Uriah Heep’s fraudulences.

In medias res: A Latin phrase meaning "into the middle of things,” and a narrative technique where a story begins in the middle of the plot, rather than at the chronological beginning. 

Homer’s Iliad begins directly into the ninth year of the Trojan War with a heated quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, rather than starting from the war's beginning. J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea effectively establishes the in medias res technique, by starting in the middle of the tragedy of Maurya's five sons already lost in the sea,and her last surviving son preparing for his final farewell. 

Déjà vu: A French phrase, that means feeling as though you've been in a place or done something before, with a distinct memory of it, even though you can't recall the details or can prove it's impossible.

 In David Copperfield, the most prominent discussion of déjà vu occurs when the narrator described the universal human experience of feeling that the current moment has happened before.