hairshirt
/ˈhɛəʃɜːt/
Etymology
From hair + shirt.
hairshirt means advocating or adopting a relatively ascetic lifestyle, especially for environmentalist reasons. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 89 out of 100.
Why this word is great
HAIRSHIRT — [Adjective] Advocating or adopting a relatively ascetic lifestyle, especially for environmentalist reasons. From the English words hair (referring to coarse animal hair) and shirt (a garment for the upper body), describing a shirt made of rough haircloth worn for penance. Unlike austerity, which denotes an imposed, often impersonal sternness, or asceticism, a broad philosophical embrace of self-denial, hairshirt implies a conspicuous, morally freighted renunciation worn as a public testament. It is the cold shower taken not for vigor but for atonement, the bicycle pedaled through a downpour as a narrated sermon, the proudly mended garment that proclaims its sacrifice—a secular mortification that mistakes the itch of the cloth for the cleansing of the spirit.
adj
- Advocating or adopting a relatively ascetic lifestyle, especially for environmentalist reasons.“The gloomy contentions of “hairshirt economists” who want more public and less private spending were assailed today by Robert W. Sarnoff, chairman of the National Broadcasting Company.”
noun
- A shirt made of haircloth; especially one worn by ascetics or the penitent.“He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer’s peas. He wears a hairshirt winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday.”
- A state of penitence and humility.“And when he went on to say, “The curse must be within ourselves,” Muir bequeathed us a hairshirt: the guilty conscience that plagues so many of us when we see what we are doing to the rest of nature.”