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 wit...