“Auspicious” vs “auspices” [closed]

Question

The two words auspicious and auspices seem so similar yet have almost opposite meaning. Is auspicious a good time or a lucky connotation while auspices is said to be an omen? If I said the weather was auspicious, is this saying the weather (maybe a storm is foreboding) at the moment looks promising?

Answer 1

‘Auspicious’ is an adjective, ‘auspices’ a noun. They both derive from the Latin for one who observes the flight of birds for guidance on how to act.

‘Auspices’ can sign be any about the future, but usually one that things are going to go well. (It can also mean ‘patronage’, as in ‘under the auspices of’). The derived adjective ‘auspicious’ generally carries a similarly favourable and positive sense, so there is no contradiction between the two. If the weather looks auspicious, then it looks promising. The opposite is ‘ominous’.

Answer 2

Auspices is plural of auspice, a particular type of omen relating to how birds fly. An omen can be good or bad, so "auspices" isn't necessarily a bad thing. An auspice can be auspicious (good) or inauspicious (bad). So yes, if you said the weather was auspicious, you'd be saying the weather looks promising.

This Wikipedia article gives an interesting history of auspices.

Answer 3

As OP already recognises, auspicious invariably means likely to have a favourable outcome.

As @Waggers says, auspices ultimately derives from prediction based on how birds fly. As used today, the auspices for [some future event] carries no particular implication that the outlook is either good or bad, except insofar as the rest of the text makes explicitly clear.

Having said that, auspices isn't normally used in that fashion, partly because we tend to use omens and signs instead. The more common usage for the word today is under the auspices of XXX, where it means with the help or protection of XXX.

Presumably the help/protection meaning arose from the recognition that the birds themselves do not deliberately adjust their flight pattern in order to affect the subject of the prophecy; they mindlessly fly in such a way as to reflect the already-written future.

Once a concious entity XXX is introduced into the metaphor, XXX can choose whether to exhert his/its influence for good or ill. For reasons which are not clear to me, our modern idiomatic usage is based on the assumption that XXX is always well-disposed to whoever's future he controls.

(if anyone knows how to deftly avoid the ungrammatical whoever's there, please enlightened me!)