A-Z Challenge: Q is for Quixotism

Posted April 21, 2011 in A-Z Challenge / 0 Comments

Today I must apologise for being late with my A-Z Blogging Challenge. I’m doing an A-Z of human emotions, feelings and mental states and yesturday I was supposed to be doing Q. Somewhere in between getting back from work, eating dinner, doing my chores and watching Glee before falling asleep it completely slipped my mind. So I’m very sorry and tonight I’ll be posting both my Q post for yesturday and my R post for today. So here goes.

Q was the trickiest letter so far. Try to think of an emotion or mental state beginning with Q and nothing really springs to mind except ‘quirkiness’ which is more of a personality trait (or can you feel quirky?)  and ‘queerness’ which may not be a real word and isn’t so politically correct these days.

A google search yielded not much else apart from Quixotism. It was a word I had heard of but had not really known it’s meaning. Apparently if you are quixotic you are caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals or idealistic without regard to practicality. So it seems a lot like impulsiveness. Again, it’s probably more of a personality trait than an emotion but I suppose it could be classed as a mental state. Perhaps sometimes you could feel in a quixotic mood? I seem to feel like that most of the time. I’m definately not realistic or practical. Ha, I know I’m clutching at straws here but Q was a hard one!

Apparently Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes is all about quixotism. The protagonist of the book is Alonso Quixano (or Quijano), a retired country gentleman nearing 50 years of age, who lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He becomes obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes their every word to be true, despite the fact that many of the events in them are clearly impossible. Quixano eventually appears to other people to have lost his mind due to lack of sleep and food from dedicating all of his time to reading. Sound familiar?!

I’m afraid I don’t have much more to say on this topic and sorry if it wasn’t the most interesting post ever but at least you have another Q word to use for scrabble now right?

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