From Encyclopedia Britannica:
Brinkmanship, a foreign policy practice in which one or both parties force the interaction between them to the threshold of confrontation in order to gain an advantageous negotiation position over the other. The technique is characterized by aggressive risk-taking policy choices that court potential disaster.
Although the practice of brinkmanship has probably existed since the dawn of human history, the origin of the word comes from a 1956 Life magazine interview with former U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles, in which he claimed that, in diplomacy, “if you are scared to go to the brink [of war], you are lost.” In response, American politician and diplomat Adlai Stevenson derided Dulles’s “brinksmanship” as reckless. The term was used repeatedly during the Cold War, a period characterized by tense relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. It marked a significant change in the conduct of foreign policy. Whereas the interaction between states had previously been predicated on the balance of power—largely based on a state’s economic and military power and the desire to prevent any major shifts in the status quo—a state’s possession of nuclear weapons created an entirely new set of foreign policy tools, which it could use to influence others.
Perhaps the best-documented case of brinkmanship was the Soviet placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962 and the U.S. response, which is now referred to as the Cuban missile crisis. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev sought to defend Cuba from the U.S. and to extend Soviet strategic power in the region by secretly placing medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, which threatened much of the continental United States. Instead of gaining a leveraged position over the U.S., Khrushchev’s brinkmanship almost brought the U.S. and Soviet Union to nuclear war. The crisis concluded after U.S. President John F. Kennedy revealed the presence of Khrushchev’s weapons and ordered a naval “quarantine” (or blockade) around Cuba, which resulted in the Soviet Union withdrawing its missiles.
From Bertrand Russell:
"Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr. Dulles calls 'brinksmanship.' This is a policy adapted from a sport which, I am told, is practiced by some youthful degenerates. This sport is called 'Chicken!'."
From Dictionary.com:
of or relating to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth.
From Merriam-Webster:
It comes from "chthōn, "which means "earth" in Greek, and it is associated with things that dwell in or under the earth. It is most commonly used in discussions of mythology, particularly underworld mythology. Hades and Persephone, who reign over the underworld in Greek mythology, might be called "chthonic deities," for example. "Chthonic" has broader applications, too. It can be used to describe something that resembles a mythological underworld (e.g.,"chthonic darkness"), and it is sometimes used to describe earthly or natural things (as opposed to those that are elevated or celestial)
From Worldwidewords.org:
This adjective refers to people and things that belong to or inhabit the underworld.
The biggest problem with it, once you’ve worked out how to spell it, is how to say it. American dictionaries suggest that the initial ch should be silent, while most British ones say that it should be said as k, reflecting the Greek source, khthon, earth. No such ambiguity exists with another word from the same source, autochthon, an original inhabitant of any country, who seems to have sprung from the soil; here the ch is said as k.
The classic Greek word referred not to the surface of the ground, which would be gaia, but to what lies underneath. Both gaia and khthon were associated with the supernatural beings that dwelled in these domains, Gaia being the personification of the Earth and the original mother of all beings, while the deities of chthonic realms were Pluto and Persephone.
It’s said that H P Lovecraft took the name of Cthulhu, his enormous alien god creature, from khthon. Certainly, Lovecraft did a lot to popularise chthonic.
From Britannica.com:
Chthonic, of or relating to earth, particularly the Underworld. Chthonic figures in Greek mythology included Hades and Persephone, the rulers of the Underworld, and the various heroes venerated after death; even Zeus, the king of the sky, had earthly associations and was venerated as Zeus Chthonius. Oracles (prophecies) delivered through incubation (that is, whereby the inquirer slept in a holy precinct and received an answer in a dream) were believed to come from chthonian powers. In the symbolism and iconography of chthonic deities, snakes are often associated with such deities in world mythology; thus, divinities are often portrayed entwined with serpents.
From BetterHelp.com:
It's talked about as a threshold, and indeed, the etymology of liminal comes from the Latin root word "limen," which means threshold. Liminal spaces are transitional or transformative spaces. They are the waiting areas between one point in time and space and the next.
During a rite of passage, an individual is at the threshold between two different states of being. Quite often, it is the state between childhood and adulthood, the space between when one isn't quite a child anymore but is not yet an adult. The person is standing in a doorway and hasn't yet gone through. Many religions and belief systems explore these concepts and create rites of passage to coincide with the threshold moments in life.
The liminal veil is what we call the place where a transition occurs between the threshold and the place that waits before us.
Liminal spaces are often physical places. In some cases, the same place may be at one time liminal and at other times not. Whenever we are at a place during a time that's not usual for that space, it can feel unsettling. Or if we're in a liminal space for longer than necessary to pass through to our actual destination, we may experience that same feeling of something being "off" that we can't quite pinpoint. Unfamiliar spaces tend to have more liminal qualities than those we see regularly.
Examples include:
1. Stairways and elevators
2. Art galleries that are empty other than you
3. Hotel hallways late at night
Wiktionary presents the TL;DR version:
1. A miniature man, once imagined by spermists to be present in human sperm.
2. The nerve map of the human body that exists on the parietal lobe of the human brain.
From the Embryo Project Encyclopedia:
The term homunculus is Latin for “little man.” It is used in neurology today to describe the map in the brain of sensory neurons in each part of the body (the somatosensory homunculus). An early use of the word was in the 1572 work by Paracelsus regarding forays into alchemy, De Natura Rerum, in which he gave instructions in how to create an infant human without fertilization or gestation in the womb. In the history of embryology, the homunculus was part of the Enlightenment-era theory of generation called preformationism. The homunculus was the fully formed individual that existed within the germ cell of one of its parents prior to fertilization and would grow in size during gestation until ready to be born.
The origin of the homunculus concept of a pre-existing fetus is usually credited to Dutch telescopist and microscopist Nicolaas Hartsoeker. He receives this credit largely because it was his sketch in the 1694 Essai de Dioptrique of a homunculus in a sperm cell that illustrated the concept most clearly. However, the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi proposed in 1673 that the entire structure of the embryo was present in the egg from the very beginning, and that the gestation period involved the growth and unfolding of that pre-existing structure. Around the same time, the French metaphysician Nicolas Malebranche discussed the idea of emboîtement, meaning encasement, for which preformationism is infamous. Emboîtement describes not just a homunculus in the egg cell or sperm cell, but an infinite train of homunculi stretching back to Adam and Eve.
