nostalgia

noun

1. 1

   A longing for home or familiar surroundings; homesickness.

   Seeing food at camp similar to his mother's cooking sent a wave of nostalgia through him.

   I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.

2. 2

   A bittersweet yearning for the things of the past.

   an alumnus' feelings of nostalgia for his/her years in high school

   I can't have been the only person, last week, to feel a rush of nostalgia upon learning that Thames Water had removed a bus-sized, 15-tonne lump of food fat ("mixed with wet wipes") from the sewers under London. The fatberg was an August news story redolent of the old-fashioned silly season.

   Though there is nothing generationally unique in the desire to bask in the banalities of your past, these nostalgia communities have flourished on Facebook as its user base has grown ever older in the past decade.

   Yet it continued to be treated as rather suspect. In the mid-20th century, a psychoanalyst called Nandor Fodor dismissed nostalgia, along with utopian politics and even the vogue for Tarzan films, as “the manifestation of a latent desire to return to the womb”.

Forms

plural

nostalgias