nugacity

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English

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Etymology

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

Noun

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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.

References

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