Each week, The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary.
This week's word:
DESUETUDE
Those clever Romans had a word,
suescere
, "to become accustomed to," and by adding the prefix de- they made it
desuscere
, "to put out of use," effectively to become unaccustomed to. The French turned it into
desuetude
, for a state of disuse, inactivity or abandonment.
Then, the English language, alert as a magpie for shiny things, picked it up and kept it for its own, though making the pronunciation "DES-wi-tood" or "DES-wi-tyood."
It may be less common than in the 18th or 19th or even 20th century, but it has not faded into disuse itself.
Example:
With the advent of computerized editing, his accustomed tools — the line gauge, the proportion wheel, the grease pencil, the typewriter — fell into desuetude.