英和和英

語源

Blend of positive +‎ pessimism

名詞

possimism (uncountable)

1. A way of thinking in which one is basically pessimistic, but manages to use it to one's advantage.
   • 1958, Robert Lowry Calhoun, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, page 59:

     The more intense pleasure the better, and the longer the better. And conversely, you seek to avoid the more intense pain. It is not hard to see that this point of view led sooner or later to a thoroughgoing possimism.

   • 1978, H. H. Anniah Gowda, The Literary Half-yearly - Volume 19, page 133:

     Alfred Kazin has said that " Nothing was so dead in 1920 as the crusading spirit of 1910 ", and to sensitive intellectuals the decade started on a note of black despair. Randolph Bourne who in the spirit of youthful optimism that marked the prewar years wrote. " It is the glory of the present age that in it one can be young ", moved toward possimism after the outbreak of the war.

   • 1979, Revue économique- Volume 30 , page 879:

     And might not the expectational effects in financial markets widen the room for macro economic policy, rather than reduce it ? This pragmatic possimism appears ultimately to be the main political force behind the relatively favourable reception of the EMS proposals in Britain.

2. An attitude characterized by pessimism about something that is superficially seen as a success.
   • 1943, Fisheries Newsletter - Volumes 2-5:

     Yet, although two of three years of continuous operation had been eminently successful, he says that "a curious note of possimism was sometimes heard from those on the spot."

   • 1977, Barbara Drygulski Wright, Expressionist Utopia: The Pursuit of Objectless Politics, page 470:

     ...and upon closer inspection Lettau determines that these works are not utopias at all but distopias; not novels of wondrous new civilizations, but novels of escape from civilization; documents, in short, not of utopian optimism but of cultural possimism.

   • 1982, Scandinavian Journal on the Developing Countries:

     Anyone who has witnessed a dream turned into a political reality during the last general elections in India, when determined and awakened people voted by a vast majority for democracy, need not entertain any possimism of the power that lies in hands of the rural poor.

   • 1991, Iroro: A Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Bendel State University, Ekpoma, Volume 4:

     The crisis which has gripped post-colonial historiography in subsaharan Africa is a reflection of the possimism which set in when the attainment of 'the political kingdom' in the 1960s failed to add “all other things.”