This avatar thing

There's a movie named "Avatar," which I have no intention of seeing but which prompted Dr. Goodword to look into the word.

avatar / æ-vê-tah(r)/ noun

1. The incarnation of a Hindu deity in human form.
2. An epitome, archetype, or embodiment of something, as the avatar of good or evil.
3. (Computers, Web) A character or image assumed by a player in a computer or online game.

Avatars are abstract ideas in real (human) form, the good doctor explains: "Barney Smith was an avatar of the modern investment broker until his investment in derivatives destroyed his company in the 2008 banking crash." The source of our principles can usually be portrayed as avatars: "I would not have survived to adulthood had my mother not been an avatar of kindness and the unflickering cynosure of my teen years." In the movie, the name wanders a bit off course, since the good guys are really clones of themselves rather than incarnations of abstract ideals.

History: Avatar comes from Sanskrit avatarah "descent" and the sense of this word has descended from the incarnation of a god to an image manipulated by someone in a computer game. The Sanskrit word comprises ava "down" + tarati "crosses over". The root of tarati also appears in tiram "brink" in Sanskrit (the oldest known Indo-European language), a sense that the Greek cast into its variation of the same word, terma "goal". Latin kept the sense of the original word in trans "across, over" but still used the newer sense in terminus "boundary, limit".

Image: Vishnu in the centre of his ten avatars. Hindus believe that sometimes a god will appear on the earth as a person or an animal. These are called avatars. The most important of the avatars are those of Vishnu who has appeared nine times, each time to save the earth.