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My Luxuria part I

Fitness & News Editorial

Luxuria (noun) - Self-indulgent sexual desire (personified as one of the deadly sins)

We associate luxury with comfort, quality, wealth, and aspiration. But it wasn’t always that way: the word originally meant lechery and lust in English. Latin had two similar words with overlapping meanings: luxus, meaning “luxury” or “excess,” and luxuria, which meant “rankness” or “offensiveness.” These terms became luxe and luxure in French, with meanings that preserved the distinctions of the original Latin. The French word luxe developed the meanings that we commonly associate with luxury: "wealth" and "indulgence."

The French phrase de luxe, meaning “of luxury,” became the English word deluxe. By contrast, luxure referred to unrestrained sexual pursuits and became a synonym of lasciviousness or wantonness and is associated with words like debauchery and perversity. This is the way luxury was initially used in English: The Oxford English Dictionary records that Chaucer refers to “O foule lust of luxurie.”

Over time, luxury drifted away from its exclusively sensual meaning to mean “sumptuous environment,” referring to food, clothes, and opulent lifestyle. This association with opulence and wealth led to the word’s most recent meaning, the one that refers to something nonessential or indulgent.

If luxury started with the physical and drifted to the material, pleasures of the senses were nevertheless always at the root of how we understand this word.

Merriam-Webster, an Etymology for luxury

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