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.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “nugacity”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)