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Saturday December 25, 2004

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benison \BEN-uh-suhn; -zuhn\ , noun:
Blessing; benediction.

In the beginning, Gibran's small estate was worth some $50,000, benison enough for a village of ten thousand souls.
-- Stefan Kanfer, "But is it not strange that elephants will yield -- and that The Prophet is still popular?", New York Times, June 25, 1972

Yet to be with him was a benison, a curiously exhilarating and anarchic experience, as the lightning celerity of his thought processes took you on a kind of helter-skelter ride of surreal non-sequiturs, sudden accesses of emotion and ribald asides, made all the more bizarre for being uttered in those honeyed tones by the impeccably elegant gent before you.
-- Simon Callow, "A life full of frolics", The Guardian, May 19, 2001

Benison comes from Old French beneison, from Latin benedictio, from benedicere, "to bless," from bene, "well" + dicere, "to say."

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for benison

 

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