Paean ***

paean







Y

[pee-uhn]



D



–noun 

1. any song of praise, joy, or triumph. 

2. a hymn of invocation or thanksgiving to Apollo or some other ancient Greek deity.  



Also, pean.





C



paean, paeon, peon (nn.)   

 

For the ancient Greeks a paean was a thanksgiving hymn to the gods, and today it is a literary name for such an outpouring of thanksgiving: 



His admirers offered paeans of [praise]. 



A paeon, in Greek and Latin verse, was a prosodic (韻律學) foot made up of one long and three short syllables; in English it is usually made up of one stressed and three unstressed syllables, occurring in any order. 一長音節三短音節構成的四音節音步



The word peon once had several specialized senses, all referring to social have-nots: a farm worker in Spanish America, usually landless; a peasant or prisoner obliged [uh-blahyj] to work off a debt; an Indian or Sri Lankan foot soldier, policeman, servant, or messenger. 

Today it has generalized to mean "an unskilled worker at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale." All these senses are Standard, but only the generalized meaning will be clear without contextual definition. (昔時印度的)土著士兵(或警察)



have-nots

(常複數)【口】較貧窮或資源貧瘠的國家或個人





　

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, 



is [at] some level 

a paean of [praise] [to] the fortitude and moral courage that 



has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.





see commend