This week’s theme
There’s a Word for It

This week’s words
tresayle
pauciloquy


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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(paw-SIL-uh-kwee)

MEANING:

noun: Economy of expression, especially in speech.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin pauci- (few) + loqui (to speak). Earliest documented use: 1623.

NOTES:

Telegrams were charged by the word, so they encouraged extreme verbal thrift. But brevity can be costly. When I was little, my family received a telegram from my mother’s father: “Mother died. Going to the Ganges river.” My mother thought her own mother had died and cried all the way to the riverbank, only to learn that the telegram referred to her grandmother. One missing word, “my”, would have spared her that grief. Pauciloquy is not always economy; sometimes the most expensive word is the one left out.
See also laconism.

USAGE:

“He suffers from pauciloquy. ... You needn’t think he’ll give us away.”
J.J. Connington; The Four Defences; Hodder & Stoughton; 1940.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: