Dr. Goodword enlightens us on similar words for a familiar state of being. Taken together, he writes, these words provide a nice little lexical toolkit for dividing inactivity into several more precise senses.
lassitude (læs-ê-tyud) means:
1. Lethargy, torpor, listlessness, a lack of energy, spirit, vitality. 2. Apathy, a lack of interest in things.
Lethargy is a drowsiness that interferes with alertness. Torpor is a deeper drowsiness, right on the edge of sleep or unconsciousness. Listlessness suggests more of a disinclination to move or be active rather than a change of mental state. Lassitude is more of a lack of motivation to act. Molassitude would be the slowest sort of lassitude—if only it were a word!
Lassitude, the good doctor informs, comes from Old French which inherited it from Latin lassitudo, the noun from adjective lassus "weary". This word is based on a stem (las-) that goes back to Proto-Indo-European *le- "let go, slacken" plus a suffix -d, *led-, that also gave English let and late, not to mention German lassen "let". With the suffix -n, it pops up in Russian as len' "laziness", in Latvian as lens "slow", and Latin lenis "soft, gentle", which is also at the bottom of English lenient.
As it turns out, one set of 19th-century writers had insights into human nature so nuanced and profound they still ring true today.
“Victorian authors do seem to be good intuitive psychologists,” concludes a research team led by psychologist John Johnson of Pennsylvania State University, DuBois. According to a large-scale study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, the authors’ depiction of the personality traits, mating strategies and goal-oriented behavior of their characters “largely mirrors the view of those variables as revealed by modern research.”
Hundreds of raters assessed, among other things, the degree to which characters reflect five essential personality traits, including “extraverted, enthusiastic,” “critical, quarrelsome,” “dependable, self-disciplined” and “calm, emotionally stable.”
By crunching this data, the researchers created psychological profiles of these fictional characters. For example, the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre scored “very low on extraversion, well above average on agreeableness and emotional stability, and high on conscientiousness and openness to experience.”
The humorist Garrison Keillor has written a review of the Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume I, which can be summed up as: don't bother buying or reading it. "Here is a powerful argument for writers burning their papers," he writes.
It is the sad fate of an icon to be mummified alive, pickled by his own reputation, and midway through this dreary meander of a memoir, Sam throws up his hands in despair: “What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. . . . His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world . . . and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. . . . Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”
In cataloging the passages he uses as evidence of the vacuousness of the book, Keillor inadvertently (or perhaps advertently?) makes the point that even he is interested enough in the minutiae of the great man's life that he would read these words and then produce a long piece reciting them.
Use plain, simple language. In a letter to D.W. Bowser in 1880 he says:
"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."
The excellent Johnson blog at The Economist takes up business cliches, including "going forward."
Usage: A favourite disfavourite of mine, this notionally means "from now on", but often just signifies "now" and is just as often totally redundant:
I am pleased to announced that I have nominated Kiyasha Gonzalez-Guggenheim to be our new head of meatball packaging going forward.
or
Kiyasha's contribution will be particularly valuable in ensuring that all our customers have a consistent and satisfying meatball presentation experience going forward.
Source: Not a clue.
Real meaning: Again, as with "to your point", this is all about having the right attitude. In business it is good to look to the future; one of the most damning subtle indictments you can make of ideas or people is that they are "not forward-looking". Reminding everyone that we are, indeed, going forward and not moving backward is essential in boosting morale. This is especially true after cataclysmic setbacks:
“Our charge going forward is to have realistic, clear goals and to execute them expeditiously.” (New Orleans deputy mayor Cedric Grant, after Hurricane Katrina).
(And by the way—I look forward to "execute expeditiously" becoming widespread enough, going forward, to include on a future version of this list.)
I do note in passing that last year some people set up an entire website devoted to purging their organisation of the phrase "going forward", and reported some success. But in the wider world it seems very much alive.
I have a sieve full of sifted thistles and a sieve full of unsifted thistles, because I am a thistle sifter.
Let’s go gathering healthy heather with the gay brigade of grand dragoons.
She sifted seven thick-stalked thistles through a strong thick sieve.
In the 19th century, tongue twisters were developed by experts in elocution as a means of mastering proper enunciation.
One practitioner was Lionel Logue, who trained as an elocutionist in his native Australia, and from that work he began taking on students for lessons in “speech correction.” Along with the tongue twisters, Logue was known to draw on other time-honored elocutionary exercises, like having a stutterer shout vowel sounds out of an open window for long periods.
Logue worked with Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), who was crippled by a stammer that made public speaking a devilish chore.
Logue prescribed a regimen of vocal calisthenics, tongue twisters among them, to improve the mechanics of Bertie’s speech. After the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936 opens the throne to Bertie, the therapy has geopolitical consequences, permitting the new king to address the nation in live radio broadcasts on the brink of World War II.
Perhaps there was more involved in his exercises.
Few, if any, of Logue’s linguistic techniques, from the tongue twisters to the word substitutions, would be used by modern speech pathologists, according to Caroline Bowen, an Australian speech therapist who maintains a Web site with information on Logue. But for Logue, the focus on vocal mechanics was most likely just a means to an end, enforcing a bond of trust with his royal patient.
Logue may not have “cured” the stammer, but by instilling a sense of confidence and chipping away at Bertie’s anxieties, he made it possible for the king to untwist his tongue and find his voice at a moment when his country most needed to hear him speak.
Gerard Van der Leun of American Digest points to this video and says, "Brilliant is the only word for this smashing exposition of the power of the English language. Richard Burton races through this poem with unbelievable speed. A technical tour de force..."
The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo
(Maidens' song from St. Winefred's Well)
THE LEADEN ECHO
How to keep--is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there's none, there's none, O no there's none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there's none; no no no there's none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.
THE GOLDEN ECHO
Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air.
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-lastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace--
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.--
Yonder.--What high as that! We follow, now we follow.--
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.
It's remarkable the Mark Twain continues to draw the crowds 100 years after his death, but here's another infatuation with a long-gone writer.
Jane Austen, the English novelist best known for Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as "Janeites" who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.
The appeal? Ms. Austen's tales of courtship and manners resonate with dating-obsessed and social-media-savvy 21st-century youths, says Nili Olay, regional coordinator for the New York Metro chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, or JASNA. Ms. Austen counts roughly 89,000 fans on Facebook, compared with 45,000 for Charles Dickens, and just 9,000 for the Brontë sisters.
Young women, in particular, find meaning in Ms. Austen's work, according to Joan Klingel Ray, author of Jane Austen for Dummies. They may be "trying to figure out how to find Mr. Right," says Ms. Ray, an English professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. "You can almost vicariously experience this through her heroines."
You're probably not writing credit card agreements, but this tells you something.
Credit card agreements are written on average at a 12th grade reading level, making them not understandable to four out of five adults, according to a CreditCards.com analysis of all the agreements offered by major card issuers in the United States.
The average American adult reads at a ninth-grade level and readability experts recommend important information -- such as credit card agreements -- be written at that level
"Credit card contracts and other such documents are written in dense prose for a reason: So that the customer will NOT be able to understand it," notes Roy Peter Clark, a national expert on writing and a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. "I may be cynical, but I don't think their writing strategies are accidental, the collateral damage of a bureaucratic mindset. I think those writers know exactly what they are doing."
"Experts advise that anything for the public should be written at the ninth grade level," William DuBay, an author and readability consultant says. "If it's about health and safety, it should be written on the fifth grade level."
having an expressive and especially plaintive quality
The campers were awoken by the plangent howl of a coyote off in the distance.
"Mr. Packard is the finest Candide I’ve seen, singing with rich,plangent tone and acting with an un-self-conscious sincerity that never falters." — From a theater review by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, October 27, 2010
Merriam-Webster: "Plangent" adds power to our poetry and prose: the pounding of waves, the beat of wings, the tolling of a bell, the throbbing of the human heart, a lover's knocking at the door — all have been described as plangent.
The word "plangent" traces back to the Latin verb "plangere," which has two meanings. The first of those meanings, "to strike or beat," was sometimes used by Latin speakers in reference to striking one's breast in grief. This, in turn, led to the verb's second meaning: "to lament." The sense division carried over to the Latin adjective "plangens" and then into English, giving us the two distinct meanings of "plangent": "pounding" and "expressive of melancholy."
What synonym of "plangent" rhymes with "soulful"? The answer is …
Salman Rushdie says he doesn't rely on inspiration.
It’s concentration more and it is to do with developing skills of concentration and I think that is something which, well a few things I think about being a writer that you get better at with time. There are things that you perhaps don’t get better at. Energy is something which maybe declines, but I think concentration, focus, the ability to shut out the extraneous and focus on what you’re doing. I think the more you do it the better you get at it.
When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You’re just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.
I think inspiration is nonsense, actually. Every so often I mean like one day in 20 or something, you will have a day when the work seems to just flow out of you and you feel lucky. I mean you feel and often surprised and you don’t quite know why it is working like that. And on days like that it’s easy to believe in a kind of inspiration, but most of the time it’s not like that.
Most of the time it’s a lot slower and more exploratory and it’s more a process of discovering what you have to do than just simply have it arrive like a flame over your head. So I do think it’s to do with concentration, not inspiration. It’s to do with paying attention and I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
"The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here."--New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009
"The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."--New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents, Nov. 29, 2010
which can be summed up as: don't bother buying or reading it. "Here is a powerful argument for writers burning their papers," he writes._hires.jpg/220px-CassandraAusten-JaneAusten(c.1810)_hires.jpg)
and 
, has been dead since 1817, yet 
. They may be "trying to figure out how to find Mr. Right," says Ms. Ray, an English professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. "You can almost vicariously experience this through her heroines."