utopio

The best etymology in this band. More wrote his book in Latin, invented an island, and named it Nowhere. That is not a later reading imposed on him: the book itself contains a poem that plays Utopia against Eutopia, no-place against good-place, and the joke is that you cannot hear the difference. Every utopia written since has been arguing with that pun.

Two senses, and the second one is a criticism. The first is neutral: an imagined ideal society, the literary genre More started and Bacon, Bellamy, Morris and Le Guin continued. The second is dismissive, and far commoner in ordinary prose: a utopia is a nice idea that will not work. Tio estas utopio means roughly "that is never going to happen". The adjective utopia carries the same edge.

The phrase that fixed the second sense. Marx and Engels divided socialism into utopia and scienca: the utopian socialists, Owen and Fourier and Saint-Simon, designed the good society and hoped to be imitated; scientific socialism claimed to describe how the thing would arrive whether anybody designed it or not. Whatever you make of the claim, the label stuck hard enough that utopian has meant well-meaning and impractical ever since.

Why the word turns up in Esperanto so often. The movement has been called utopian by its opponents since the 1880s and has spent a good deal of energy answering the charge. Zamenhof's Homaranismo, his proposal for a shared ethical framework alongside the language, is exactly the sort of thing the word was aimed at, and he knew it. An Esperantist reading utopio on the page is rarely reading it neutrally.