Word of the Day for Tuesday August 30, 2005

I was going through some old emails just now and discovered an interesting one from 8/30/05 (the day we 1st returned to see what was left of our home). I have an email subscription to the dictionary.com word of the day and the word on August 30th was as follows:

Word of the Day for Tuesday August 30, 2005

evanescent \ev-uh-NES-uhnt\, adjective: Liable to vanish or pass away like vapor; fleeting.

The Pen which gives. . . permanence to the evanescent thought of a moment.
--Horace Smith, Tin Trumpet

Every tornado is a little different, and they are all capricious, evanescent and hard to get a fix on.
--"Oklahoma Tornado Offers Hints of How a Killer Storm Is Born," [1]New York Times, May 11, 1999

The accidentally famous. . . may write books, appear on talk shows, and, in so doing, attract even greater public attention. This type of celebrity status, of course, is brittle and evanescent.
--Lawrence M. Friedman, [2]The Horizontal Society
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Evanescent is from Latin evanescere, "to vanish," from e-, "from, out of" + vanescere, "to disappear," from vanus, "empty."

Funny. Sort of.