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Evanescence: Thinking about a word

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Sometimes ordinary-language words embed deep and important truths. I believe this is the case with the word "realty" for example, which English speaking people use for a certain species of property. Realty looks suspiciously like "reality" and the fact may get us to thinking metaphysically about the fecundity of land, the relative permanence of land versus chattels, fixedness, etc. and how these are all earmarks not just of realty but of reality as well.

But I suspect I've said all that before here. Today I'm thinking about another fraught word: evanescence. Or in the adjectival form, evanescent. Indeed, one important feature of this word is that we're much more accustomed to it as an adjective than as a noun: one encounters "an evanescent X" much more often than one encounters "evanescence." 

Further, the connotation is almost always positive. We think of valuable things as fleeting. (Which makes this an odd word to couple with the one I just mentioned -- realty certainly carries value.) We think of the sublime as entering into our lives at brief moments and then leaving either regrets or fond reminiscence behind. 

William Allen White used the term memorably in his novel, In the Heart of a Fool (1918), “As the actors unload their wagons the spectators may notice above their heads bright, beautiful, and evanescent forms coming and going in and out of being.” These forms, White soon thereafter says, are the “visions of the pioneers.” We are surely supposed to accord such visions a positive valence, to cheer that they sometimes ‘go into’ being and to be unhappy that they sometimes go out again. The evanescence is of a piece with the  brightness and beauty.


The beginning of the word “evanescent” may remind us of the word “evangelist,” and we may in turn remember from a Sunday school lesson that an evangelist is a bringer of good news. We may (fleetingly) even wonder whether the similarity comes from the commonality of the root -- could “evanescent” mean a good sort of essence?

Well … no. In “evangelist” we see the old prefix for goodness, “eu,” with the bottom of the “u” sharpened to turn it into a “v.” But in “evanescent” we see a preface of negation, “ex” softened a bit as the “x” turns into a “v.” The “ex” suggests fleetingness better than “ev” and much bette than “eu.”


Still, there is wisdom in language, and this wisdom may manifest itself in this convergence of these two words of different history, this evangelism of evanescence. We look for the really best of our goods, the most moral of our goods, to the fleeting, to that which is here and now but which we now know shall soon enough be neither.




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