prelapsarian
adjUK /pɹiːlapˈsɛːɹɪən/
Etymology From pre- + Latin lapsus (“fall”) + -arian.
1
Christianity Judaism Of, or relating to the period of innocence before the Fall of man; innocent, unspoiled.
- It is the prelapsarian Polynesia of free love, noble savagery, Kon Tiki rafting and Easter Island statuary, not the Levi’s-wearing, Toyota-driving, pédalo-pushing, efflorescent-cocktails-in-a-split-coconut-serving pseudo-paradise that awaits latter-day travellers.2001, Stephen Brown, Marketing – the Retro Revolution, London: SAGE Publications, →ISBN, page 139:
- Ideally, individual stories and God's plan share the same final goal, namely, returning to a prelapsarian state of perfect communication with God.2004, Janet Bertsch, Storytelling in the works of Bunyan, Grimmelshausen, Defoe, and Schnabel, page 4:
3 more examples
- Back in those ancient, prelapsarian days, "girl-on-girl" hadn’t even been invented yet.2006 April 10, George Saunders, “Nostalgia”, in The New Yorker, archived from the original on 17 Oct 2012:
- Can you really turn a few keyboards outside London's landmarks into the equivalent of a pub honky-tonk for a good old knees-up; a 50s living room where the family would gather around the piano every evening, in some prelapsarian vision of the olden days […]?2010 June 1, Tom Service, The Guardian:
- Conservative think-tanks have the same dream of return to a prelapsarian innocence.2010 September 23, “The perils of constitution-worship”, in The Economist:
- Synonyms
- antelapsarian, superlapsarian, halcyon
- Antonyms
- postlapsarian
- Related terms
- lapsarian, postlapsarian
- Coordinate terms
- antediluvian