Daily Vocabulary

anachronism: something which is out of place temporally. Usually this will mean something in a movie or book that you've spotted that's wrong. A wrist watch in a fantasy film, or the wrong armor in a historical book, or a hair style that just didn't exist. It also applies to people and attitudes, of course. There are those who willfully embrace the past, or are unable to come into the present. Those few who say still that they wouldn't let their child date a person of another race, for instance, are fully anachronistic. For that matter, those who think they can dictate who their child dates are pretty much in the same category. A house littered with antiques would be a lovely anachronism, or a collection of them, I suppose. And I've often wanted, sometimes desperately, to be able to spend a day, an hour, even just a minute, observing another time and place and seeing what it was really like. To have bubbles of anachronism floating about would be, well, horrible in practice really, but a nice idea.