evanescent
adjective

- lasting for only a short time, then disappearing quickly and being forgotten

- soon passing out of sight, memory, or existence; quickly fading or disappearing

- denoting a field or wave which extends into a region where it cannot propagate and whose amplitude therefore decreases with distance (physics)

Cambridge Dictionary / Oxford Languages

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WORD ORIGIN

"Evanescent" entered the English language around 1717, borrowed from French évanescent, which in turn came from Latin evanescere, meaning "to disappear, vanish, pass away".

The Latin evanescere is composed of the prefix e- (a variant of ex-) meaning "out”, and vanescere meaning "to vanish”, which is derived from vanus meaning "empty, void”.

The original meaning in English was "on the point of becoming imperceptible". By 1738, it had developed the sense of "quickly vanishing, having no permanence".

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NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay.

“Nothing Gold Can Stay" (Robert Frost)

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SYNONYMS

A blink of an eye, a drop in the bucket, a flash in the pan, a mere shadow, as brief as a sneeze, as fleeting as a shooting star, as short-lived as a mayfly, blink-and-you'll-miss-it, brief, bubble-like, butterfly-like, capricious, chimerical, come and gone, delicate, diaphanous, disappearing act, dissolving, effervescent, ephemeral, ethereal, EVANESCENT, evaporating, fading, fast-fading, flashing, fleeting, flitting, floating away, fluttering, fragile, fugacious, fugitive, gossamer, gone in a flash, here and gone, here today gone tomorrow, illusory, impermanent, in passing, insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, like a soap bubble, like morning dew, melting away, momentary, passing, quick as a wink, short-lived, slipping away, temporary,  there and gone,  transient, transitory, vanishing, volatile, wispy

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a sentence, say something like:

“EVANESCENT news stories dominate headlines for a few days, then fade forever from public memory.”

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HAVE A LAUGH and connect today’s OWAD with last Friday’s in a witty way… say something like:

"In the grand scheme of the universe, our existence may be EVANESCENT, but that won't stop humans from QUIBBLING about whose turn it is to do the dishes.”

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Paul Smith
(OWAD-Founder)