schwarmerei: M-W's Word of the Day

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The Word of the Day for August 3 is:

schwarmerei \shavair-muh-RYE\ noun
: excessive or unwholesome sentiment

Example sentence:
The poet's later works are refreshingly free of the schwarmerei that hobbled his earlier efforts.

Did you know?
In 1845, the editors of the _Edinburgh Review_ felt compelled to use the German "Schwarmerei" to describe fanatical enthusiasm because the concept seemed so foreign to them. In commenting on the writings of German critic and dramatist Gotthold Lessing, they declared "Schwarmerei" to be "untranslatable, because the thing itself is un-English." That German word derives from the verb "schwarmen," which means not only "to be enthusiastic" but "to swarm" (it was used to refer to bees), and its ancestors were part of Old High German. Ironically, the _Edinburgh Review's_ use (the first ever documented in an English publication) seems to have contributed to making the word much more English, and it has since become a naturalized citizen of our language.

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