Everyone who has lived in this world for enough years, who has left behind youth and youth, is tormented by a painful feeling of longing for time that has gone into oblivion. What is the name of this phenomenon - "nastalgia" or "nostalgia"? Only the last option is true, and today we will explain why this is so.
Value

Before thinking about spelling, you need to determine the meaning of the word. To solve the problem, as always, we need an explanatory dictionary. It contains the following meaning of the object of study: "Longing for the homeland, for the native home, in general - longing for the past." The past is insidious, for when it is present, it is not so attractive to man. The present, in contrast to the past, is always severe, but then a person gains strength, which is powered by life experience, and the time and events left behind no longer seem so severe to the observer. A working person wants to return to the student bench, the student wants to go to school, and the student just wants to break out of school. Question: “How do you spell nostalgia or nastalgia?” suggests a simple answer, but this is not the only point. It is important to understand what kind of phenomenon is hidden in this concept. Why are we yearning for the past, and not content with such a wonderful and vibrant present? Let's first look at nouns that could replace an object of study.
Synonyms
If the reader still does not decide for himself how “nostalgia” or “nostalgia” is correct, he can always make a move with a knight and replace the word with a synonym. So that he had something to choose from, we will provide him with a list of these simple definitions:
- sadness;
- sadness
- spleen;
- blues;
- melancholy.
Five synonyms is enough. The reader may reproach us with liberties, for all the conditions listed here may not be directly nostalgia. True, but nostalgia is only a special case of longing, so analogues of the latter can always replace the object of study. After all, a person more often does not yearn for a specific Motherland (here you can even with a capital letter), he suffers, because there is no harmony, justice in the world. In other words, there is a myth about Eden from which a man was expelled when the devil seduced him, but there is no return to his home. That is why the longing of us all gnaws from time to time.
Nostalgia mechanism
You can’t talk about how "nostalgia" or "nastalgia" is written, and not to say about the essence of the phenomenon. In order not to make mistakes, you need to clearly understand what it is about. To improve literacy, we have already examined synonyms, it remains to understand why such a condition covers a person, especially when everything is not bad.
As mentioned above, memory is insidious, because it has a creative ability to transform the facts of the past. As a result, a person remembers not what happened, but only what he really wants to remember. For example, only laughter, fun and friends are remembered from the student body, and not lack of money, the horrors of the session and other unsightly difficulties. Thus, each previous stage of life seems better than the next. A man or woman thinks that in the present it is difficult, but in the past there were no such problems: the water was wetter, the snow was whiter. By the way, here it is the essence of the conflict between fathers and children: the former are in a state of permanent nostalgia for the past, while the offspring simply have nothing to compare with, they have no nostalgia. We think this is clear. We turn to the mnemonic device, which will remember how to write "nostalgia."
Focus with memory in the service of philological literacy
Do you know who mnemonists are? These are people who, thanks to various tricks, are able to remember things completely unrelated to each other, for example, consecutive cards in the deck. But in fact, everything is simpler than it seems. They create logical connections that allow them to combine all the cards into a single story. Yes, it’s another matter that history still needs to be remembered, therefore it is necessary to have a good memory. Let us and we try to do the same. Compose a story and, using associations, remember the spelling of the word.
Imagine an old grandfather who in his youth was very fond of fighting, and he had a steel sword. Our hero has a grandson, but he does not understand Russian well. Parents immediately after his birth left for England. In turn, the grandfather, naturally, hardly speaks English, except for those phrases that are known to us all from school. Despite the language barrier, the grandson loves his grandfather and wants him to be less sad, so he asks him in broken Russian why he is sad, looking out the window for days on end. But the patriarch, not knowing how to explain to the child that he is sad because of his bygone youth, tells him in the same broken English: “No steel,” that is, in a very rough translation: “There is no steel checker, like my youth.”
We hope that the grandson and grandfather will eventually understand each other, and we need to remember only this wonderful phrase “No steel”. Because it is precisely it that will allow us not to make a mistake in writing and solve the dilemma “nastalgia” or “nostalgia”, since the letters “o” and “a” in this dictionary word are unstressed. If the reader remembers this, the rest will not be a problem.
Is there a recipe for longing?
Of course, it is also simple: the present should be more interesting than the past. A person should be an arrow piercing space and time, flying towards his goals, dreams and desires. True, this is easier to write than to accomplish. Someone in this sense helps rational tricks, which boil down to the understanding that longing is unreasonable. But a person, like almost any living system, is subject to periods, so once we feel good, once we feel bad, but on average we are fine, if not, we are changing something. Constantly no one is capable of experiencing nostalgia or longing; this is an extremely painful state in order to receive joy and a charge of vivacity from him.