shrewdom
English edit
Etymology edit
Noun edit
shrewdom (uncountable)
- The realm or sphere of shrews (nagging, ill-tempered women).
- 2018, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature:
- Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term. […] Her voluble egotism; her sense, not of radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her 'faults' and 'imperfections' in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return upon herself, as covered with 'confusion' at each new manifestation of God's singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of shrewdom: a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in gratitude, and silent.