By special request from RollinsCat:
Hubris
Hubris (Hew-briss) is overwhelming pride, overconfidence, and arrogance with regards to one's own position and power - particularly in a literary sense leading to tragedy. In Greek theatre in particular, hubris often lead to the prideful mortals in question challenging the gods - most often with unfortunate results for the prideful.
In most literature, those characters who display hubris often are portrayed as getting "what was coming to them". The Bible used this trope, in Proverbs 16:18: "Pride goes before destruction" (often paraphrased as "Pride goeth before a fall.")
A final literary example before we get to my own creations:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Usage:
- The hubris of the gnomish inventor who claimed the lock he had created could not be picked was repaid in full when he awoke to find his house picked bare.
- Johnny the bard ought to have known what would result from his hubris. With a claim like 'No being from this world or any other can outplay me.', it's no surprise that a cowled stranger might appear with a fiddle case in one hand and the smell of brimstone in the air.
Reference:
- Hubris | Define Hubris at Dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hubris)
- hubris - Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hubris)
I take a certain ghoulish delight in these words. You might say it's a bit...
Macabre
Meaning ghastly, horrible, gruesome; representative of or referring to death - sometimes, specifically, the dance of the dead, the last frenzied jerking before life leaves the body - in any or all of its definitions, macabre (muh-kaw-bruh, or simply muh-kawb) is a grim word indeed.
It is also used to refer to certain works of art and literature (for example, the works of E.A. Poe or Munch's Scream (http://sexualityinart.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/scream.jpg)) - mostly those works that leave the audience unsettled, unnerved, or disquieted.
An example from... ahem... literature:
A hatch opened up and the aliens said,
"We're sorry to learn that you soon will be dead.
"But though you may find this slightly macabre,
"We prefer your extinction to the loss of our job."
-Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eGwX72zgUYg/SeLVLvFVbCI/AAAAAAAAAD0/t_hKv3jYT2c/s1600-h/jon2.GIF)
Usage:
- Fr. Logan glanced at the necromancer's retreating back and grimaced. He knew that his Lady rejoiced in all uses of magic, but he still found the man's macabre practices deeply disturbing.
- The unusual, the bizarre, the macabre... all were available at the Carnival.
Reference:
- Macabre | Define Macabre at Dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/macabre)
- WordNet Search - 3.0 (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=macabre)