Sunday Word: Desuetude

[sallymn]

desuetude [des-wi-tood, -tyood]

noun:
discontinuance from use or exercise; disuse

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Examples:

The chair offers not a weedy patina of desuetude but an apotheosis of its former occupant. (Dave Barry , The Idiot's Guide to Art, The Guardian, September 2009)

Even among the eccentric annals of poets who talked to God, angels, tutelary spirits, and disincorporated souls, Fernando Pessoa is a special case. (Arthur Lubow, A Photographer Turned the Tables on His Parents to Learn About Himself, The New York Times, March 2023)

The ancient bowling-green at the Stewponey remains in good condition to the present day, although the once popular and excellent English pastime of bowls has there, as elsewhere, fallen into desuetude. (Sabine Baring-Gould, Bladys of the Stewponey)

In process of time this religious house again fell into desuetude; but before it disappeared it had achieved a great name for good works, and in especial for the piety of its members. (Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm)

No bond united him to the Saint-Germain quarters now in its dotage, scaling into the dust of desuetude, buried in a new society like an empty husk. (Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against The Grain)

Origin:

'discontinuance of use, practice, custom, or fashion,' mid-15c., from Latin desuetudo 'disuse,' from desuetus, past participle of desuescere 'become unaccustomed to,' from de 'away, from' + suescere 'become used to, accustom, habituate,' from PIE swdh-sko-, from extended form of root s(w)e- pronoun of the third person and reflexive (referring back to the subject of a sentence). From 1630s as 'state of disuse.' (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Desuetude must be closely related to disuse, right? Wrong. Despite the similarities between them, desuetude and disuse derive from two different Latin verbs. Desuetude comes from suescere, a word that means 'to become accustomed' (suescere also gave us the word custom). Disuse descends from uti, which means 'to use.' (That Latin word also gave us use and utility.) Although less common, desuetude hasn't fallen into desuetude yet, and it was put to good use in the past, as in the 17th-century writings of Scottish Quaker Robert Barclay, who wrote, 'The weighty Truths of God were neglected, and, as it were, went into Desuetude.' (Merriam-Webster)