While reading Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism I came across an account of contemporary conspiracy thinking, and how such ideas as that of George Soros as evil puppet-master “could never have taken root if multiple economic and social crises, not to mention the unpunished ruling class crime wave preceding the financial crash, hadn’t established the orectic conditions for their uptake.” In other words, people had to be first primed to believe things that there was little evidence for. They had to want to believe, which is what “orectic” refers to.  The dictionary definition is “relating to appetite or desire.” It’s not a word I’d encountered before, but comes from the Latin for stimulating appetite and the Greek for desire.

I didn’t know “orectic,” but it made me think of an obscure word that I do use occasionally for desire: esurient. This comes from the Latin esurire (to be hungry) and has the meaning of hungry or, more often, greedy. I remember first coming across it when reading Will Durant’s History of Civilization, in a description of greedy heirs waiting for the deaths of their parents as “esurient ghouls.” That’s always stuck in my head. But orectic, which has a similar meaning, was new to me. I don’t think either word is used much now, though spellcheck recognizes esurient while orectic is flagged.

Words, words, words