Sunday Word: Perspicacious

[sallymn]

perspicacious [pur-spi-key-shuhs]

adjective:
of acute mental vision or discernment; keen

Examples:

One perspicacious pal did comment: "Another book about Elizabeth? What’s left to say?" (Clare McHugh, 'Q’ is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth unlike any other, The Washington Post, October 2024)

Chris M L Burleigh is a poet with a distinctive and refreshingly light-hearted voice expressed through his viscerally nuanced and at times acutely perspicacious work. (Paul Spalding-Mulcock, Interview With Chris M L Burleigh, Yorkshire Times, October 2021)

I guess if you were so big-picture perspicacious that you established the trick that affects half the answers you might have been able to do it, but most of us toss an answer or two onto a grid when getting started. (Caitlin Lovinger, Back on the Job, The New York Times, March 2018)

It is an unusually perspicacious analytic deduction from inconspicuous clues that we call ratiocination, or more familiarly, the detective instinct. (Carolyn Wells, The Technique of the Mystery Story)

Anthony, the courteous, the subtle, the perspicacious, was drunk each day - in Sammy's with these men, in the apartment over a book, some book he knew, and, very rarely, with Gloria, who, in his eyes, had begun to develop the unmistakable outlines of a quarrelsome and unreasonable woman. (F Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned)

Origin:

"sharp-sighted," also "of acute mental discernment," 1630s, formed as an adjective to perspicacity, from Latin perspicax "sharp-sighted, having the power of seeing through; acute," from perspicere "look through, look closely at," from per "through" (from PIE root per- "forward," hence "through") + specere "look at" (from PIE root spek- "to observe"). (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Comments

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I like the visual!