Endangered Species

Word of the Day for Thursday February 14, 2002:

philter \FIL-tur\, noun:
1. A potion or charm supposed to cause the person taking it to fall in love.
2. A potion or charm believed to have magic power.

transitive verb:
To enchant or bewitch with or as if with a magic potion or charm.

Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love
because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the
need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need,
you have to watch your step; like having drunk a philter,
the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing
you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
--Umberto Eco, [1]Foucault's Pendulum