nugacity

English

Etymology

From Latin nugacitas (“trifling”), from nugax, -acis.

Noun

nugacity

1. 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.

Related terms

• nugacious
• nugation
• nugatory

 

References

• “nugacity”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.