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4:44am
2012/06/03
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I wonder what the name of the poem means. The book has a note:
The title alludes to the type of drama called “comedy of manners” and coins a word combining the suffix -edy with the Greek root path- (as in pathetic, sympathy, pathology).
So, what does that "-edy" mean?
6:05am
2009/03/03
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I don't think it is helpful to go so far as to say that the -edy suffix means anything in English. There are only a few words in English in which it is found in this context: comedy, and tragedy. There are also a few coined terms that allude to these two iconic terms to form new categories for a performance that doesn't easily fit into the two classic categories: seriocomedy, dramedy, and your pathedy.
Since the words comedy and tragedy come to us almost whole from ancient Greek, we can still look back there for the meaning of the parts: tragedy (apparently lit. "goat song," from tragos "goat" + oide "song."); comedy (from komos "revel, carousal" + oidos "singer, poet"). The poetic form of the ode comes from the same Greek roots as the -edy suffix.