Today's Word

Kitschy

[ki-chee]

Definition

(adjective) A word to describe something that is considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way. It often refers to art, decorative objects, or ideas that are overly sentimental, pretentious, or tacky.

Example

The tourist shop was filled with kitschy souvenirs, from snow globes of the Eiffel Tower to plastic replicas of famous sculptures.

Fun Fact

The word “kitsch” comes from the German word “verkitschen,” which means “to make cheap.” It emerged in the art markets of Munich in the 1860s and 1870s, used to describe cheap, popular, and marketable pictures and sketches. Over time, it evolved to describe any art or object that is excessively garish, sentimental, or in poor taste. Interestingly, while “kitsch” was originally a purely negative term, it has gained some positive connotations in postmodern culture, where kitschy items are sometimes celebrated for their ironic appeal or as nostalgic artifacts.

Previous Words

Sybaritic

Today's Word

Sybaritic

sib-uh-RIT-ik

Definition

(adjective) Relating to or characterized by excessive devotion to sensual pleasure and luxury.

Example

The retreat was unapologetically sybaritic — every surface chosen for how it felt, every meal an event, every hour structured around pleasure so deliberately it became its own kind of discipline.

Word Origin

Sybaritic derives from Sybaris — an ancient Greek colony in southern Italy founded around 720 BCE, whose citizens became so legendarily devoted to luxury and pleasure that their name became synonymous with the lifestyle itself. The Sybarites were said to banish roosters from the city to avoid being woken early, to have invented reclining dining couches so they needn’t sit upright while eating, and to have trained their horses to dance to music — a detail that proved their undoing when the rival city of Croton played pipes during battle and the Sybarite cavalry danced itself into confusion. Sybaris was destroyed in 510 BCE, but its reputation outlasted it by two and a half millennia.

Fun Fact

The fall of Sybaris is one of antiquity’s most satisfying cautionary tales — a city so devoted to pleasure that it was defeated by the very refinement it had cultivated. The story of the dancing horses became a standard example in ancient rhetoric of how excessive luxury produces military weakness, cited by everyone from Aristotle to Athenaeus. Modern historians note that the dancing horses story is almost certainly apocryphal — but it was too perfectly sybaritic to be abandoned, which may be the most sybaritic thing about it.

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Kitschy

Definition

Example

Previous Words

Sybaritic

Sybaritic

Definition

Example

Word Origin

Sybaritic

Gaffe

Lassitude

Wheedle

Callow