noun
definition
A chronological mistake; the erroneous dating of an event, circumstance, or object.
definition
A person or thing which seems to belong to a different time or period of time.
Examples of anachronism in a Sentence
The Lodge remained an anachronism, and was allowed to decline.
In many ways the Order had become an anachronism.
The story which tells how the two went out one morning to dance round a tree of liberty in a meadow is an anachronism, though in keeping with their opinions.
Peter Watkins uses TV broadcasting, a deliberate anachronism, to stage his tale of the Paris Commune.
Abimelech is called "king of the Philistines," but the title is clearly an anachronism.
But if the Order had now become a superfluous anachronism, it had still to be disposed of, and this was no easy task.
In his fondness for mythological subjects (Hercules, Theseus) and his introduction on the stage (by a bold anachronism) of the poets Archilochus and Hipponax as rivals of Sappho, he approximates to the spirit of the latter.
In this digital age an aerial may be something of an anachronism but it still provides a strong visual mnemonic for TV.
But the national existence and name of the Turks (q.v.) seem to date from the 5th century A.D., so that it is an anachronism to speak of the Yue-Chi as a division of them.
Henceforth ordinary dogmatic dualism was excluded from philosophy; any attempt to revive it, whether with Dr Johnson by an appeal to common prejudice, or in the more reflective Johnsonianism of the 18th-century Scottish philosophers, must be an anachronism.
In fact, one of the greatest repositories of online dance instruction is at the Society for Creative Anachronism's Medieval Dance page, which has directions and entire books full of dance steps for one to many dancers.
The best Italian Latin is but an echo and an imitation; like the painted glass which we put in our churches, it is an anachronism.
This conclusion is untenable, and the suggestion that the author was Pedro de Lobeira (who flourished in the 15th century) involves a glaring anachronism.
Now we have here a patent anachronism which destroys the possibility that this book was really written by the Apostle Barnabas.
Maybe it's poetic justice, maybe creative anachronism, or maybe a circle of interpretation.
In truth Sabatier's St Francis is an anachronism - a man at heart, a modern pietistic French Protestant of the most liberal type, with a veneer of 13th century Catholicism.
It also introduced the deliberate anachronism, such as the oscillating fans and manual keyboards in the newsroom of Network 23.
For many decades, the Society for Creative Anachronism has held re-enactments of medieval tournaments, usually wearing armor created by the fighters themselves.
The attack on Sir Robert Filmer in Locke's First Treatise on Government was an anachronism.
A Glasgow professor, the Rev. Mr Simson, was attacked for Arminianism and Socinianism as early as 1717; and the battle raged between the more severe Presbyterians - who still hankered after the Covenant, approved of an old work The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1646), and were especially convinced that preachers must be elected by the people - and the Moderates, who saw that the Covenant was an anachronism, thought conduct more important than Calvinistic convictions, and supported in the General Assembly the candidates selected by patrons, as against those chosen by the popular voice.
Nearly two terms of fighting the Cold War led him to conclude, as he put it, War in our time has become an anachronism.
It would be an anachronism to think of Francis as a philanthropist or a "social worker" or a revivalist preacher, though he fulfilled the best functions of all these.
In the second of the above books his idea of religion is somewhat of an anachronism; as he himself confessed, he " used the word in the sense which it invariably bore half a century ago," as denoting " belief in an ever-living God, a divine mind and will ruling the universe and holding moral relations with mankind."
It needed but a jolt to bring down the crazy anachronism, and the jolt came when, in 1558-60, floods of Muscovites poured over the land, threatening the whole province with destruction.
Yet we cannot help feeling that it is a grotesque and unseemly anachronism to apply in grave prose, addressed to the whole world, those terms of saint and angel which are touching and in their place amid the trouble and passion of the great mystic poet.
This anachronism arises from the fusion of the epic Guillaume with the champion of Louis IV., and from the fact that he was the military and civil chief of Louis the Pious, who was titular king of Aquitaine under his father from the time when he was three years old.
So the notion of formal or constitutional authority attaching to the apostolate, in its various senses, is an anachronism for the apostolic age.
The cause Of this anachronism has been the failure of intuitive realism and the domination of idealism, which makes short-sighted men suppose that at all events they must begin with the psychology and the psychological idealism of the day, in the false hope that on the sands of psychological idealism they may build a house of metaphysical realism.