Meaning
A person who endures pain, loss, or tedium without complaint - unflinching, ungroaning, dry-eyed. As an adjective it describes both the person and the bearing: stoic patience, a stoic refusal of painkillers, the stoic queue at the pharmacy. Approving - it praises dignity under pressure; note the philosophy was richer than grit, a point every modern Stoic enjoys making. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Zeno of Citium began teaching around 300 BC in the Stoa Poikile, the painted portico on Athens's Agora, and the porch named the school - the movement was briefly called Zenonism until followers declined the personality cult. The Stoic system was vast - Chrysippus's propositional logic, a physics of fate and cosmic renewal, an ethics in which virtue alone is good and passion an error of judgment - and its ideal was apatheia, freedom from destructive emotion: Epictetus's sage is sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy. The English noun came through Middle English and Latin from the portico's name, and the modern sense - one who represses feeling or endures patiently - is the ethics flattened to a grimace; the Stanford Encyclopedia kindly observes that the adjective stoical is not utterly misleading about its origins. William James wrote of stoic resignation to necessity in 1902; Trains Illustrated judged in 1959 that crossing Europe by car would make a stoic of any Rolls owner.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a stoic acceptance
- stoical
- stoicism
Usage Examples
- The patient was stoic about the cast, less so about the six weeks without the violin.
- She received the audit's findings with stoic courtesy and a shopping list of appeals.
- Generations of supporters have remained stoic about November, the rain, and the away fixture list.