It's the Word of the Day podcast for November 25th.
Today's word is perdition, spelled P-E-R-D-I-T-I-O-N.
Perdition is a noun.
It refers to hell or to the state of being in hell forever as punishment after death.
In other words, damnation.
It's usually used figuratively.
Here's the word used, in a sentence from the Chicago Sun-Times.
ACDC has been criticized
for sticking to its straightforward musical formula for more than 50 staggering years,
but there's little denying the appeal of the group's adrenalized and reliable approach.
As Angus Young stated in the liner notes for a reissue of The Razor's Edge, ACDC equals power.
That's the basic idea.
That energetic jolt is sometimes the perfect means to raise spirits and spread actual joy,
even coming from a band offering the cartoonish imagery of plastic horns and travel down the road to perdition.
Perdition is a word that gives a darn and then some.
It was borrowed into English in the 14th century from the Anglo-French noun perdition,
and ultimately comes from the Latin verb perdire, meaning to destroy.
Among the earliest meanings of perdition was, appropriately, utter destruction,
as when Shakespeare wrote of the perdition of the Turkish fleet in Othello.
This sense, while itself not utterly destroyed, doesn't see much use anymore.