Achillean
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˌækɪˈliːən/
Forms: form: more Achillean
form: most Achillean
Etymology: From Achilles + -an.
Senses: examples: text: Guyon subdues these Achillean affections through his own power; but they break out again as Cymochles lapses into lust and Pyrochles burns in the idle lake.
ref: 1959 September, A.C. Hamilton, “Spenser's Treatment of Myth”, in ELH, volume 26, number 3:
text: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has offered salutary warnings against seeing in male homosexuality a simple "epitome, ... The two genres of homosocial behavior in the text can be seen as chivalric or antichivalric, Hectoresque or Achillean: the first is active, specular, militant, conservative, apparently (not really) heterosexually inflected; the other is listless, covert, pacifistic, and passively subversive, clearly (not entirely) homosexually inclined.
ref: 1995, Eric Scott Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England, →ISBN:
glosses: Resembling or relating to Achilles, the hero of the Iliad.
glosses: Resembling or relating to Achilles, the hero of the Iliad.
Invincible with only one small weakness (an Achilles heel), which becomes one's downfall.
glosses: Resembling or relating to Achilles, the hero of the Iliad.
Guided by emotional motives, especially rage, rather than reason.
examples: text: There is, I suggest, a typically Achillean joke at play here, a visual pun, displaying the phoenix as truly phoenix-ian in its exposure of its sex organs and at the same time snidely alluding to the Phoenicians' famed preoccupation with female genitalia.
ref: 2004, Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, →ISBN:
text: We are once again reaching a period in our collective cultural history when we may resume the post-Platonic, Achillean conversation.
ref: 2009, David A. Powell, 21st-Century Gay Culture, →ISBN, page 51:
glosses: Of or relating to Achilles Tatius, a Roman-era Greek writer.
examples: text: Tendon-reflexes, as a rule, remain intact, except the Achillean one, which is frequently either absent or lowered.
ref: 1890, The London Medical Recorder - Volume 3, page 481:
text: The Achillean reflex is the contraction obtained in the gastrocnemii and solei by the percussion of the tendo Achillis.
ref: 1901, The Medical Examiner and General Practitioner:
text: The posterior compartment contains the Achille's tendon, the deep pre-Achillean and superficial retro-Achillean bursae, and the posterior aspect of the talo-calcaneal joint.
ref: 2015, Yasser El Miedany, Musculoskeletal Ultrasonography in Rheumatic Diseases, →ISBN, page 371:
glosses: Pertaining to the Achilles tendon.
examples: text: Historically, there was indeed an Achillean, homosexual flavor of the declassé bachelorhood out of which Hitler and others formed the advance guard of National Socialism.
ref: 1980, Douglas Fowler, A Reader's Guide to Gravity's Rainbow, page 169:
text: Thus, he exalts as a means of republican cohesion, as the unshakeable basis of the modern nation what he calls "manly love," a sort of Achillean friendship, but at the same time it is this love, this passionate friendship that he sings.
ref: 1995, Gay Wilson Allen, Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman & the World, →ISBN, page 254:
text: For Theocritus Idyll 29.34 the sexual love between Achilles and Patroclus was so uncontroversial that it could be referred to in a pederastic poem by means of the shorthand "Achillean friends".
ref: 2007, Waldemar Heckel, Lawrence A. Tritle, Pat Wheatley, Alexander's Empire: Formulation to Decay, page 87:
synonyms: word: MLM
english: Men Loving Men or Men who Love Men
translation: Men Loving Men or Men who Love Men
glosses: Of or relating to sexual or romantic intimacy between men, supposedly in the style of Achilles' relationship with Patroclus.