It's the word of the day for January 14th.
Today's word is deus ex machina, spelled as three words as they would be in Latin,
D E U S E X M A C H I N A. Deus Ex Machina is a noun.
A Deus Ex Machina is a character or thing that suddenly enters the story in a novel,
play, or movie and solves a problem that had previously seemed impossible to solve.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Jane Austen and The Price of Happiness.
The poultry thieves in Emma provide a particularly humorous example of Deus Ex Machina,
the arrival of a poultry thief into the surrounding area on the penultimate page of the novel,
no less.
And his theft of Mrs. Weston's turkeys frightens Mr. Woodhouse enough to consent to Emma's marriage and to allow Mr. Knightley to move into Hartfield.
The new Latin term Deus Ex Machina is a translation of a Greek phrase that means literally a god from a machine.
Machine in this case refers to the crane, yes the crane,
that held a god over the stage in ancient Greek and Roman drama.
The practice of introducing a god at the end of a play to unravel and resolve the plot dates from at least the 5th century BC.
Euripides was one playwright who made frequent use of the device.
Since the late 1600s,
Deus Ex Machina has been applied in English to unlikely saviors and improbable events in fiction or drama that bring order out of chaos in sudden and surprising ways.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.