20100101Word of the Day Happy New Year

junli

vicissitude

\vih-SIS-ih-tood; -tyood\ , noun;
1.Regular change or succession from one thing to another; alternation; mutual succession; interchange.
2.Irregular change; revolution; mutation.
3.A change in condition or fortune; an instance of mutability in life or nature (especially successive alternation from one condition to another).
名词 n. [C]
1.变化无常;变换
2.盛衰;兴败[P]
His life is marked by vicissitudes.
他的一生几经沉浮。
3.【古】【诗】交替;循环

Quotes:
This man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hopeless poverty.
~Thomas Macaulay,
Max had rescued his father's gold watch through every vicissitude, but as it didn't go I took it to a watchmaker.
~Edith Anderson, Love in Exile: An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin
It has come about that this writer, who at the beginning might have appeared in unique occupation of a marginal and peripheral world, is instead writing from the center of a historical vicissitude, utterly contemporary.
~Elizabeth Hardwic, "Meeting V. S. Naipaul",

Origin:
Vicissitude comes from Latin vicissitudo, from vicissim, in turn, probably from vices, changes.