Thursday, July 20, 2006

Word of the Day for Thursday July 20, 2006 nescience

nescience \NESH-uhn(t)s; NESH-ee-uhn(t)s\, noun:Lack of knowledge or awareness; ignorance.


  • The ancients understood that too much knowledge could actually impede human functioning -- this at a time when the encroachments on global nescience were comparatively few.-- Cullen Murphy, "DNA Fatigue", The Atlantic, November 1997
  • He fought on our behalf in the war that finally matters: against nescience, against inadvertence, against the supposition that anything is anything else.-- Hugh Kenner, "On the Centenary of James Joyce", New York Times, January 31, 1982
  • The notion has taken hold that every barometric fluctuation must demonstrate climate change. This anecdotal case for global warming is mostly nonsense, driven by nescience of a basic point, from statistics and probability, that the weather is always weird somewhere.-- Gregg Easterbrook, "Warming Up", The New Republic, November 8, 1999

Nescience is from Latin nescire, "not to know," from ne-, "not" + scire, "to know." It is related to science. Nescient is the adjective form.

No comments: