nugacity
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From Latin nugacitas (“trifling”), from nugax, -acis.
Noun
[edit]nugacity
- futility; trifling talk or behaviour; drollery
- 1901, William Lee Howard, The Perverts, page 22:
- For the first time in his life of twenty-five years, Leigh Newcomber was seriously thinking of personal and practical matters; and this mental state being an untrained one, he jumped from impulse to impulse, and from reason to nugacity; and after a while reason and impulse became so commingled as to leave him in a bewildering maze of mental and moral incertitude.
- 1980, Carl A. Raschke, The Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism and the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness, page 120:
- In the poem "Among School Children" Yeats gives the nugacity of temporal life a bittersweet rendering.
References
[edit]- “nugacity”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.