vaguen

English

WOTD – 13 April 2021

Etymology

From vague +‎ -en (suffix forming transitive verbs from adjectives, meaning ‘to make [adjective]’), coined by Nobel-winning Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), apparently first in a manuscript note to himself on an initial typescript of his play Happy Days (1961).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /ˈveɪɡən/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -eɪɡən
• Homophone: vegan (one pronunciation)
• Hyphenation: va‧guen

Verb

vaguen (third-person singular simple present vaguens, present participle vaguening, simple past and past participle vaguened) (informal)

1. (transitive) To make (something) vague or more vague; to blur, to obscure. [from 1961]
   • 1988, Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956–76: From All that Fall to Footfalls with Commentaries on the Latest Plays (Irish Literary Studies; 28), Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, →ISBN, page 149; quoted in James Little, “‘Vaguening’ Confinement: Watt”, in Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (Historicizing Modernism), London, New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, →ISBN, page 51:

     [Rosemary] Pountney sees the term ‘vaguen’ in the play’s second typescript as ‘explicit testimony to [Samuel] Beckett’s policy of “vaguening” the later drafts of his plays’ (1988: 149).

   • 1999, Maria M. Delgado, Caridad Svich, editors, Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes (Art of Theater Series), Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, →ISBN, page 12:

     Mud causes most critics to invoke Beckett, and like that master Fornes [i.e., María Irene Fornés] "vaguens" the setting of her elemental characters.

   • 2003, Gordon Scott Armstrong, Theatre and Consciousness: The Nature of Bio-evolutionary Complexity in the Arts (Artists and Issues in the Theatre; 14), New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang, →ISBN, page 41:

     To situate an image or a phrase on the boundaries of several interpretations—to "vaguen" the image—so the viewer/listener must work the consequences of the situation within neural maps of the cerebral cortex, is obviously a goal of any artist.

   • 2011, Dirk van Hulle, “The Genesis of Beckett’s Last Works”, in The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Stirrings Still/Soubresauts and Comment dire/What is the Word (Beckett Digital Manuscript Project; 1), Brussels: University Press Antwerp, →ISBN, page 57:

     This increasing ambiguity fits in with Beckett's strategy to ‘vaguen’ his text, as Rosemary Pountney has demonstrated with reference to the theatre.

   • 2018, Trish McTighe, “‘Be Again, Be Again’: The Gate’s Beckett Country”, in David Clare, Des Lally, Patrick Lonergan, editors, The Gate Theatre, Dublin: Inspiration and Craft (Carysfort Press; 1414)‎^[2], Oxford, Oxfordshire, New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang, →ISBN, archived from the original on 30 March 2021, page 299:

     The spaces of Beckett’s drama and prose—particularly the later work—seem for the most part abstract, dislocated, and disconnected from material place. The strategies that Beckett employed in his writing, his vaguening of time and place for instance, have helped foster this popular way of seeing that work.

2. (intransitive) To become (more) vague; to blur.
   • 2004 January, S[tanley] E. Gontarski, “An Art of Incompletion: A Preface”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, volume 14, numbers 1–2, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 6:

     As both artists [Samuel Beckett and Joseph Mallord William Turner] developed, their imagery vaguened. The result is imagery hazened, a studied, a crafted indistinction. Beckett thus situates himself (and his art) in the midst of such a late-modernist or early postmodernist ethos, exploring the issues of perspective and so consciousness, of perception much celebrated but doomed to distortion and incompletion, for the remainder of his career.

   • 2015 winter, Graham Fraser, “‘Haze Sole Certitude’: Beckett’s Late Vaguenings”, in Journal of Modern Literature, volume 38, number 2, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, pages 120–121:

     In an example of the kind of wavering syntax that characterizes all the ill-said language to follow, vagueness penetrates the finest grain of Beckett's language here [in Ill Seen Ill Said (1982)]. […] "Say one furlong. On an average" blends the meanings of "say" as "let us suppose"—a tentative hypothesis—and "say" as "approximately"—a gesture of rough measurement that is promptly vaguened to "an average".

Usage notes

The word is chiefly used in relation to Beckett’s works and writing style.

Derived terms

• vaguened (adjective)
• vaguening (noun)

Translations

to make (something) more vague — see also blur,‎ obscure

to become more vague — see also blur

Anagrams

• ungave

Catalan

Verb

vaguen

1. third-person plural present indicative of vagar

Galician

Verb

vaguen

1. inflection of vagar:
   1. third-person plural present subjunctive
   2. third-person plural imperative

Spanish

Verb

vaguen

1. inflection of vagar:
   1. third-person plural present subjunctive
   2. third-person plural imperative