Athwart

By Deane Barker • • tags: definition •
Updates
This content has been updated 2 times since it was first published. The last update happened .

Definition: to stand in opposition to

Why I Looked It Up

William F. Buckley famously said:

A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Update

Added on

From the novel Reamde:

After a few agonizingly slow and controversial minutes of this kind of progress, they came athwart of an alley, no wider than a doorway, on their right side.

In this context, I think it means “perpendicular.” The characters were in a van at the time, and so they would have been across the opening of he alley.

Indeed, Merrium includes this as a definition:

across especially in an oblique direction

Update

Added on

From The Tyranny of Clichés:

It was this kind of Utopian madness that Edmund Burke and his heirs stood athwart, yelling “Stop!”

Clearly, this is a callback to Buckley’s statement from above.

Links from this – Reamde September 6, 2022
An absolutely fantastic novel. Very, very long, but it never slows down. It’s more Tom Clancy than cyberpunk. A MMOPRG does play a part in the plot, but it’s more about globe-hopping and gunfights than computers. You know how when you read about ransomware attacks from Asia, you think, “Man, I wish...
Links from this – The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas July 6, 2023
This is a sort of snarky book, but still very well-written. The author is tired of clichés that he believes the political Left has “captured,” but which he believes are simply not true. He spends the book deconstructing them. Some of the clichés the author is upset about (written in the form of...