daymare. On first coming across the word, you might think it a recent coinage by some whimsical writer tuned into the times. But daymare, patterned after nightmare and referring to a similar condition occurring during wakefulness, goes back to at least the early 18th century. It was probably invented by English author Matthew Green in his poem “The Spleen” (1737), which praised the contemplative life as a cure for boredom: The daymare Spleen, by whose false pleas Men prove suicides in ease . . . Coleridge confessed that he had daymares, an English medical writer called daymares “attacks of imperfect catalepsy,” and James Russell Lowell implored: Help me to tame these wild day-mares That sudden on me unawares. |