In the Alexander McCall-Smith novel I just finished reading, The Revolving Door of Life, the concept of antisyzygy, and particularly Caledonian antisyzygy, comes up. I had to look it up as I didn’t know what it meant or how to pronounce it.

The term Caledonian Antisyzygy refers to the “idea of dueling polarities within one entity”, which apparently typical for the Scottish psyche and literature. It was first coined by G. Gregory Smith in his 1919 book Scottish Literature: Character and Influence [source].

Syzygy [ˈsɪz.ɪdʒ.i], comes from the Late Latin syzygia ‎(conjunction), from the Ancient Greek σύζυγος ‎(súzugos – yoked together), and was borrowed into in English in 1847 (in its astronomical meaning). It means:

– A kind of unity, namely an alignment of three celestial bodies (for example, the Sun, Earth, and Moon) such that one body is directly between the other two, such as occurs at an eclipse.
– An archetypal pairing of contrasexual opposites, symbolizing the communication of the conscious and unconscious minds.
– A relation between generators of a module.
– The fusion of some or all of the organs.
– The association of two protozoa end-to-end or laterally for the purpose of asexual exchange of genetic material.
– The pairing of chromosomes in meiosis.

Source: Wiktionary